End of Chapter

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry. Get me on to these things and I’d bore you for hours.’

  Basil Ryle was staring at the mantelpiece with a kind of smouldering animosity: one of those pieces, he might have been thinking, would have saved my dad in the Slump. The face under his red hair was white and peaky, with dark rings under the eyes. He looked as if he was still suffering from shock: the shock of Thursday night, wondered Nigel, or of Monday morning? Or was it he who, on Friday evening, had used the razor? Strange to think a murderer might be sitting here amid these coloured tiers of porcelain that glowed like herbaceous borders.

  At the round table in the dining-room he sat between Mrs. Geraldine and Liz Wenham. On the wall facing him hung oil paintings of two inscrutably-bearded personages—the founder of the firm, James Wenham, and John Geraldine, his first partner. With a pleasant mixture of ceremony and informality, Arthur raised his glass and said, ‘the firm and its founder.’ Liz Wenham murmured the words devoutly as she drank the toast: it meant as much to her as, quite clearly, it meant all-my-eye to Basil Ryle, who made but a perfunctory response.

  Nigel glanced at the side plates, noting their delicate apricot colouring.

  ‘You have your treasures for use as well as for ornament, Mrs. Geraldine.’

  ‘Yes. But we only bring out the Rockingham set on these special occasions.’

  Nigel hoped he did not look like a man who has been struck a violent blow in the solar plexus.

  ‘Is it a recent acquisition?’ he asked, aware of Stephen Protheroe’s quizzical eye upon him.

  ‘Oh no. My husband specialised in Rockingham ware very early—before we were married.’ She gave an affected little tinkle of laughter. ‘It was quite like marrying into a china shop.’

  ‘Yes, I picked them up cheap in the Twenties,’ said Geraldine. ‘You could get bargains still in those days.’

  ‘People didn’t always know the value of their own possessions,’ put in Stephen—a remark which sent a little waft of uneasiness round the table. It seemed to Nigel a suitable moment for moving in.

  ‘I glanced at Miss Miles’s autobiography yesterday,’ he said.

  Arthur Geraldine broke the somewhat dismayed silence with, ‘And what opinion did you form of it?’

  ‘As literature, worthless. As an unconscious character-study, fascinating.’

  ‘“Unconscious”?’ said Stephen. ‘I’d have thought her whole life was a series of posed self-portraits.’

  ‘What is fascinating is to compare the self she exposed with the self she thought she was exhibiting.’

  ‘This is all too subtle for me,’ Liz Wenham said.

  ‘And must we talk about the poor wretched woman just now?’ said Mrs. Geraldine.

  ‘Why not?’ Basil Ryle muttered. ‘It’s what we’re all thinking about.’

  There was another awkward silence. Mrs. Geraldine had the rattled look of a veteran hostess who for once has lost control of her party. Ryle broke out again:

  ‘Why are we trying to pretend nothing has happened?’

  ‘Because we’re so damned civilised,’ said Stephen, with a sympathetic chuckle.

  ‘Where I come from, we called a spade a spade. And we didn’t look upon policemen as guardian angels.’ Basil Ryle had already been drinking: his words, his glances round the table, were slurred.‘ They were on at me last night. Why did you visit the deceased on Thursday? From information received, we understand you had a violent disagreement with her. What was the subject of this disagreement? Did you have another meeting with her, subsequent to the scene at her house? Did I, in other words, walk into her room here and cut her throat? Sweet Christ!’

  A meaningless smile was frozen on to Mrs. Geraldine’s face. Liz Wenham, her rosy-apple cheeks and bright clear eyes, together with her elaborate, unbecoming toilet of coffee-coloured lace, making her look like a child in fancy-dress, came to the rescue.

  ‘My dear Basil, of course you didn’t. That’s quite out of the question. But you must pull yourself together. The trouble with you is that you will bottle everything up—it’s just asking for an explosion.’ Liz Wenham’s tone was pure and wholesome as a North-country beck. ‘You had a row with Miss Miles. All right. I don’t blame you. But why turn the whole thing into a Strindberg melodrama? It’s morbid. Worse than that, it’s maudlin self-pity.’

  ‘Well, I must say’—Basil laughed shakily, subdued by this cold douche. ‘I expect you’re right, Liz, but—’

  ‘Of course I’m right. And I want to enjoy this delicious tournedos. If we must have a post-mortem, let’s keep it for after dinner.’

  At this point Nigel led Geraldine to talk about the history of the firm, which the senior partner was glad to do, showing himself also a ripe anecdotalist. The dynasty of Wenham & Geraldine had been unbroken for over a hundred years. Arthur and Liz were the third generation. Liz went into the firm from Girton. Arthur succeeded a cousin, who had died in 1925: he had not intended to make publishing his profession, but as the nearest in line of succession to John Geraldine, after the cousin’s death, he had thought it wrong to refuse. The strength of this dynastic feeling was evident in the way both Arthur and Liz talked about the firm: it could be called fanaticism, were it not so absolutely calm and self-assured. Personal ambition, if it existed in them at all, came second to the firm’s prestige. No wonder, thought Nigel, the libel business was such a blow to them: but how far would either of them carry this loyalty? As far as, in the last resort, destroying someone who was a threat to the firm’s good name? No, that’s surely unthinkable. But if Arthur Geraldine is ‘G’—is ‘Rockingham’? If he had an illegitimate child and deserted its mother? Would not such a revelation, even nowadays, cause a respectable pillar of publishing to totter?

  After dinner, when they had drunk their coffee in the drawing-room, Mrs. Geraldine left them. It was the normal practice on these occasions, though tonight it was not done so that the partners could talk shop. As the door closed behind his hostess, Nigel felt a tension in the air: the other three were looking at him, expectantly and uneasily. He answered the unspoken question:

  ‘Afraid there’s nothing much to tell you yet. I had a talk with Inspector Wright this afternoon; but he’s a bit at sea—too few clues and too many suspects.’

  ‘Too many?’ said Arthur Geraldine. ‘You mean we’re all under suspicion?’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. I thought I had been cast as the murderer,’ said Basil Ryle.

  ‘Really now, Basil! Just because you had a difference of opinion with—’

  ‘Difference of opinion!’ The young man laughed harshly. ‘That’s like Dr. Johnson calling Ben Nevis a not inconsiderable protuberance.’

  Nigel eyed Ryle non-committally. ‘It could be argued that your quarrel with Millicent Miles points to your innocence.’

  ‘A pretty paradox,’ said Stephen. ‘Pray enlarge upon it.’

  ‘The murder was premeditated and very carefully worked out. Ryle would hardly have time for that between Thursday night and Friday evening. But, if he’d planned it well in advance, he’d not call attention to himself by squabbling with his victim the night before. By the way, what were you squabbling about?’

  ‘I prefer not to say.’

  ‘Oh, Basil, don’t be so noble!’ said Liz Wenham strenuously. ‘We’re your friends, I hope. Even if you had to keep it from the police—’

  ‘Very well, Liz, if you must have it,’ Ryle blurted out. ‘I was fond of her. I’d thought she—well, had some feeling for me. I found I was wrong. She disabused me of the notion very thoroughly.’

  ‘Because she’d discovered you couldn’t be of use to her?’ asked Nigel. ‘Over reissuing her novels? Something like that?’

  Ryle nodded, miserably, his eyes cast down. Liz Wenham broke out:

  ‘And about time you were disabused, Basil. Trailing after that woman as though she was an angel of light!’

  ‘You don’t stop loving somebody because she turns out—turns out—’ Basil Ryle’s
voice, almost inaudible, guttered down to nothing. No one could look at him. Stephen Protheroe broke the embarrassed silence:

  ‘Well, Basil has been cleared. What about the other candidates?’

  ‘Nobody has been cleared,’ said Nigel. ‘Not yet. The other candidates, as you call them, are in this room. Plus Cyprian Gleed, of course.’

  Arthur Geraldine looked shocked. ‘My dear fellow, are you suggesting that Miss Wenham, or—or I—?’

  ‘The police are bound to suspect anyone whose alibi is unconfirmed. They go for the obvious first, and they are usually right. Cyprian Gleed is the obvious suspect, because he had a strong motive and his alibi is unsupported. But they can’t do anything about it till they find the weapon, or some bloodstained clothing, or the spare key to the side-door here.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s why they’ve started asking about our movements on Saturday and Sunday,’ said Geraldine.

  ‘Yes. The murderer might not have disposed of the weapon, etc., till then.’ Nigel paused for a moment. ‘You see, none of you has an adequate alibi even for the period when the murder was being committed. Mr. Geraldine was alone in his room from 5.20 to 5.50—these times are all approximate of course. Mr. Ryle was alone in his room from 5.25 to 6.0. Miss Wenham was alone in her room from 5.20 to 5.30: she then left the office—that’s corroborated; but theoretically she could have let herself in again at the side-door, killed Miss Miles, and still got to her cocktail party in Chelsea by 6 p.m. or soon after.’

  ‘But it’s absolutely fantastic to suppose that Liz—’ protested Geraldine.

  ‘I’m simply telling you what’s in Wright’s mind. It has also occurred to him that a woman might wear goloshes, several sizes too big for her, to confuse the investigation. Well then, there’s Protheroe. Miss Sanders confirms that he left the building at 5.20. We know that he caught the 6.5 at Waterloo, because his friends met the train at the other end. He says he walked to Waterloo over Hungerford bridge. But he too could have popped back into this building by the side-door, and—’

  ‘No, he couldn’t,’ Liz interrupted. ‘It’s bolted inside till 5.30.’

  ‘I could have undone the bolts, though,’ offered Stephen, ‘then gone out through the reception room, then—’

  ‘Stephen, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,’ Liz Wenham said, half scoldingly. Her affection for the little man had never been so evident to Nigel.

  ‘All this popping out and popping in is nonsense,’ Arthur Geraldine declared. ‘You’d be spotted returning to the office. Particularly at 5.30, when a lot of the staff are leaving by the side-door.’

  ‘I think it’s morbid talking like this at all.’ Liz Wenham’s face was flushed. ‘It’s preposterous to suppose that one of us could commit a murder—that sort of murder, anyway.’

  ‘All right,’ said Stephen Protheroe. ‘We four are much too decent to kill even a Millicent Miles. So, by elimination, Cyprian Gleed must be the culprit. No doubt he has a watertight alibi which the eminent sleuth, Strangeways, will finally puncture.’

  ‘No. He was alone in his flat from 4.30 to 7.0, he says. He can’t prove this, and we can’t disprove it—so far. He says he was expecting a visit from his mother, fixed up by telephoning her here the previous afternoon: he expected her some time between 5.30 and 6.30: he was alone during the period because he wanted to have a private conversation with her.’

  ‘You think he made all this up?’ asked Geraldine.

  ‘If an alibi was in his mind, I’d have thought he could have cooked up something a bit better. And Miriam Sanders says a call did come through from him to his mother on Thursday afternoon.’

  ‘Well, that settles it then.’

  ‘I’m sorry, it does not. Cyprian could have rung up to make an appointment with her here. Or he may have persuaded Miriam Sanders to invent the telephone call.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘She’s his mistress. And, I fear, quite under his thumb.’

  ‘Miriam?’ exclaimed Liz Wenham. ‘But she’s a First in History.’

  Even Basil Ryle joined in the laughter. Flushing, Liz added, ‘I don’t mean that history scholars don’t go to bed with people. But she’s a clever girl, ambitious too—she’d never take up with a worthless little runt like Gleed.’

  ‘Oh, Liz,’ said Ryle. ‘I’m clever and ambitious, and look who I took up with.’

  ‘That’s entirely different.’

  ‘It occurs to me,’ said Geraldine slowly, ‘if the telephone call did come through, and if someone overheard it—or Miss Miles could have mentioned to someone here that she was going to have an interview with her son the next day—well, it’d give the murderer—but of course that’s pure speculation. I—’

  ‘What on earth are you dithering about, Arthur?’ Liz sounded pettish.

  Stephen Protheroe grinned at her. ‘I’m perpetually being reminded that Millicent occupied the adjoining room. As if I needed a reminder! What Arthur was trying to say is that I could have overheard the telephone conversation, known from it that Gleed would be alone in his flat on Friday evening, and arranged the crime for that period so as to throw suspicion on the wretched youth.’

  ‘Oh really now, Stephen!’ Geraldine began to protest.

  ‘And did you?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Arrange the murder?’

  ‘Overhear the telephone conversation?’

  Stephen Protheroe hesitated a moment before replying:

  ‘I seem to remember her telephone bell going that afternoon: it didn’t ring often. But I couldn’t have heard what she said.’

  At this point Nigel’s sinus began to ache fiercely again, and with apologies to his host he disposed himself full length on a sofa to inject the nose-drops, sympathetically watched by the others. Their faces, and the beautiful ranks of porcelain, swung in a semi-circle, then swung back, as, dizzy for a moment, he resumed an upright posture. He found himself gazing at Liz Wenham’s eyes, noting in them an abstracted, apprehensive look which he had never seen there before. Becoming aware of his scrutiny, she said:

  ‘You ought to have it operated on. No good tinkering about with patent remedies.’

  ‘I’ve been advised against what they call surgical interference.’

  Arthur Geraldine leant forward. ‘One thing I can’t understand—why do the police think it happened between five and six?’

  ‘Between 5.20 and 6.0, you mean. Protheroe didn’t leave his room till 5.20.’ Nigel explained about the nailing-up of the sliding window. ‘That suggests the crime was committed while there were still people in the office: but your staff all leave not later than 5.30 on Fridays. The only danger, from the murderer’s point of view, was that one of the partners might be working till later. In fact, two of you were.’

  Liz said, ‘I can’t think why it has to be assumed that the murderer is one of us, or one of the staff.’

  ‘It’s only assumed that the murderer was someone the victim knew, and was probably expecting—someone, at any rate, familiar with the layout and working hours of the office.’

  Basil Ryle had been looking more and more puzzled.

  ‘But do you mean to say—? However well she knew the murderer, surely she’d think it very queer if he started nailing up that window?’

  ‘Oh, that was done after the murder.’

  ‘What? I thought you said it was done as a precaution against his being caught—’

  ‘Not caught in the act of murder. Caught doing what he had to do after it.’

  The partners looked at one another in bewilderment.

  ‘After the murder?’ said Stephen Protheroe. ‘But that’s fantastic! He wouldn’t hang around—

  ‘Destroying his traces, you mean? Laying false clues, or something?’ asked Geraldine.

  Nigel was thinking fast. He had to make a snap decision. If the murderer was one of these four, he might be put on his guard or he might be rattled by what Nigel could say at this point.

  ‘I don’t know if—it’s just a conjecture of mine
,’ he slowly began. ‘Well, say a hunch. Suppose the secret of this crime lies in Millicent Miles’s past. Suppose her autobiography contained a vital clue to motive. The murderer might have known this, or guessed it. If so, he’d want to find the page in her book that would give him away, and remove it. So he’d nail up the window—’

  Liz Wenham almost exploded with impatience. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that he sat down, after killing her, to read through two hundred pages of typescript? He’d take the whole lot away, surely, and destroy it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. A more subtle mind—and I think we’re dealing with a subtle mind—might prefer to take away only the incriminating page or pages—’

  ‘Well, are any missing?’ asked Ryle.

  ‘No. But he might have nailed up that window to give him time for typing substitute pages. One of your staff did hear someone typing in Miss Miles’s room at 5.30 last Friday.’

  Arthur Geraldine exclaimed, ‘Oh, but that’s too bizarre, my dear fellow. Surely you’re wasting your time—’

  ‘I don’t agree at all, Arthur,’ said Stephen Protheroe. ‘I’m almost beginning to get interested in the crime myself. If Strangeways is right, it presents a pretty exercise in textual criticism: which pages, if any, can be shown on internal evidence to have been written by another hand? Or perhaps’—he smiled, engagingly at Nigel—‘you’ve already discovered that?’

  ‘No. As I told you, I’ve only had time just to glance at the book. I’ll have to get down to it tomorrow—no, I’ve got interviews then—the day after tomorrow.’

  Liz Wenham said, ‘But isn’t it a job for the police?’

  ‘Well, yes. However, Inspector Wright knows me pretty well; and literary detection isn’t his line.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind having a go at this,’ declared Stephen with animation. ‘I’ll have to read the darned thing some time, anyway, if we’re still going to publish it. Perhaps we could collaborate over the problem.’

  ‘Don’t be so ghoulish, Stephen,’ said Liz.

  ‘It might be useful,’ Nigel said, politely but non-committally. Well, he thought, some sort of a trap has been baited. Now let’s wait and see if anyone falls into it within the next twenty-four hours or so.