‘Give my boyfriend something worth reading about, wouldn’t it?’ she said, with a giggle, taking up the dislocated stance favoured by modern fashion models.
‘You’ll knock them cold,’ said Nigel, and reached for the telephone.
‘I’d like to have put that blonde across my knees and given her a good hiding,’ declared Inspector Wright. ‘Here we’ve been, wasting a dozen men’s time for a week, just because she chose to lock up this information in her silly little head.’
It was nine o’clock on the same evening. Nigel had dined with Clare Massinger in her studio, and she was now making another pot of coffee for the inspector, who had just dropped in. His long, sallow face looked gaunter than ever after the intensive labours of the last week, and the brightness in his eyes seemed almost feverish.
Clare poured him out a large cup of coffee and tipped some brandy into it, then curled herself up close to Nigel on the settee. Wright raised his cup to her:
‘Your health, Miss Massinger. This’ll save my life.’ He glanced round the studio, nodded at an exhibit, and with one of his dazzlingly vivid pantomimic gestures sketched the movement of a sculptor’s hands moulding the clay. ‘How’s the old slap-and-tickle going?’
‘Mustn’t grumble.’
Clare and the inspector enjoyed keeping up the fiction that he was a deplorably uncultivated person whose idea of art went no further than Highland cattle and indecent postcards. He teased her for a little on these lines, accepted another laced coffee, fished out a ball of clay from between the seat and the side of his armchair.
‘Funny places your guests park their chewing-gum,’ he observed.
‘I’d like to do your hands one day,’ said Clare.
‘What’s wrong with my face?’
‘Oh, that’s quite interesting too. But you’d never sit still long enough for a portrait bust.’
‘I’ll sit still for a month when I’ve got this case tied up.’
‘But I thought it was.’
‘Bless your heart, lady, it’s only just begun. Chap answering to the description of Cyprian Gleed seen leaving the premises just after the time the murder could have been committed. All right, we pull him in for an identification parade tomorrow—set him in line with half a dozen other types wearing duffel coats and large black hats.’
‘And beards,’ said Nigel.
‘All right. We can rustle up false beards for them. But do you think that nitwit Susan Jones will be able to pick out our man? It’d be a miracle. And they don’t happen—not to me.’
‘So you’re sure he’s your man?’ asked Nigel. ‘What about that page inserted in the autobiography?’
‘Lord love you, Mr. Strangeways, that’s the strongest bit of evidence against him, to my mind. Not that the D.P.P. would look at it. You’ve been barking up the wrong tree. The whole thing’s quite simple. Young Gleed is desperate for money, and he hates his mother. When I first interviewed him, he pretended not to know that she’d made no will. But he might well have known that she hadn’t. All right. She’s going to die intestate. Now he’s been in and out of her room at Wenham & Geraldine’s; he’s had plenty of opportunity to read her book. There’s a page in it which states or suggests that she’d had a child by another man before her marriage to Gleed’s father. This page may not have made it clear she never married the man. That doesn’t greatly matter, because in his last conversation with you young Gleed showed he knew nothing about the law of intestacy—didn’t know that a bastard has no standing at all where there is a legitimate child. The page he typed after cutting his mother’s throat was inserted to ensure that the authorities should never look further than himself for the next-of-kin.’
‘Yes,’ said Nigel slowly, ‘that seems plausible enough. But aren’t you forgetting the other thing the murderer did to the typescript?’
‘I’m forgetting nothing,’ Wright strenuously replied. ‘You’re thinking of the erased capital G further back? Look—imagine you’re Cyprian Gleed. You’ve killed your mother, you’ve taken out the give-away sheet and replaced it with the fake one you’ve just typed. You riffle back through a few pages of the typescript, and suddenly your own initial stares you in the face.’
‘But—’
‘In that state of mind, he could easily mistake a G for a C. Cyprian. He’s in a hell of a hurry to get away—no time to study the reference of that capital letter. It just rises up off the page and points at him, like his dead mother’s finger. So he hurriedly rubs it out.’
‘You’re an awfully imaginative man, Inspector,’ said Clare, shivering a little.
‘Yes,’ said Nigel. ‘I hadn’t thought of that possibility.’
Inspector Wright now outlined his next moves. Cyprian Gleed was under close surveillance. Wright had interviewed him again this afternoon, but without bringing up Susan Jones’s statement. Gleed had denied buying recently either a duffel coat or a grip-bag. Armed with photographs of the young man, Wright’s team would intensify their efforts to trace such purchases and that of a cut-throat razor. The appeal to the public had so far produced nothing useful; but, now that Susan Jones’s statement had narrowed down the time-limit, a further appeal would appear in tomorrow’s newspapers, based on the probability that the murderer had thrown his bag off Hungerford Bridge at about 6.45, five minutes after leaving the publishers’ office. It was already established that the duffel-coated figure had not been a bona-fide visitor.
‘What puzzles me,’ put in Nigel at this point, ‘is that he should still have been wearing the coat when Susan saw him. It must have been blood-stained. Admittedly, the staff have all left by 5.40 p.m. on Fridays; but there was still a risk of bumping into one of the partners. Why didn’t he take off the duffel coat and put it in the bag before leaving Miss Miles’s room?’
‘Probably just forgot to. Nerve snapped at last. Anything to get out of that room double-quick.’
‘Do you suggest he walked out into the street covered with blood?’
‘He could have taken off the coat and stowed it away after he’d gone through the swing-door and before opening the street door.’ Inspector Wright’s burning eyes were fixed upon Nigel’s. ‘Never satisfied, are you, till you’ve crossed all the t’s.’
Nigel shrugged. ‘I expect you’re right. But I’m still bothered about that duffel coat. He did everything else so very much according to plan. And there was something Susan said to me—or rather, the way she put it. You gave a sort of unconscious echo of it, yourself, a few minutes ago.’ He broke off, looking abstracted.
‘The maestro’s got an attack of mystification,’ Clare remarked.
‘There are times when a uniform can be the best disguise. Remember Chesterton’s story about the postman? But this would work the opposite way—a murderer wanting himself to be seen. Ah well.’ Nigel turned suddenly upon the inspector. ‘Have you considered Arthur Geraldine in the role of a dark horse?’
‘Now where are we off to?’
Nigel described his interview with the senior partner after lunch. Suppose that Millicent Miles’s original story, as told to Mrs. Blayne, had been true. Suppose the young Geraldine did try to assault that extremely mature schoolgirl. The ‘blinding row’ which took place, Geraldine had said, over the sale of the Rockingham set, might have been in fact over his attempt upon Millicent. Her father might have agreed to let the matter go no further, in return for cash. Certainly, a year later, though he had not got another job, he had seemed to Stephen to be living quite comfortably. Mr. Miles could have no hold over the young Geraldine without a written confession by the latter. He would hush the matter up, in return for an annual payment, say, and the confession as security for it. When Mr. Miles died, a few years after his wife, this confession would pass into the hands of his daughter. At that period she was affluent. But recently, with her books out of fashion, might she not have brought the document into circulation again?
‘It’s a preposterous idea,’ said Wright warmly. ‘A young chap might fall for that sort of intimida
tion; but Geraldine isn’t a callow youth now; he’d go straight to the police, if Miss Miles threatened him; he’d know that the plaintiff’s name isn’t mentioned nowadays in blackmail trials of this kind.’
‘That’s all very well in theory. But in practice he couldn’t be sure that his name wouldn’t come out. And a respectable publisher’s reputation couldn’t survive that sort of scandal—not when it was backed by a written confession.’
‘All right,’ said the inspector in a humouring way. ‘So he murdered her to stop her mouth. Where’s the document, then—the confession? It’s definitely not among her papers. But if she brought it to the office last Friday, to bargain with him, don’t tell me he couldn’t have taken it from her without having to slit her throat first. Or alternatively, he’d buy it from her, in which case the murder would be pointless.’
Nigel made a defeated gesture. The sinus pain was bad this evening, blunting his intelligence. He took from his pocket a bottle of nose drops, filled the syringe and unscrewed it, placing the bottle on the floor beside him. Clare got up from the settee to make room for Nigel to lie full length on it and hang his head backwards over the edge. In doing so, her foot caught the bottle, knocking it over.
‘Oh, damn it all, Nigel, why will you always leave things on the floor?’
‘Sorry, darling.’
‘It’s gone all over the rug.’ Clare looked about for an old cloth, then bent down to mop up the liquid. ‘Nigel!’
‘What’s the matter?’ Holding the filled syringe, Nigel sat upright. Clare, rigid, pointed at the stain on the rug, from which a thin, vicious thread of smoke was now rising. The next instant she stamped her foot on the stain, as if it were a viper—stamped again and again, till Inspector Wright pulled her away from it. The black rug, where the liquid had splashed out, was turning a dirty brown. Bright-eyed, the inspector regarded it.
‘Ha! Oil of vitriol.’
‘What?’ Clare was glaring stupidly at the bottle. She stooped as if to pick it up.
‘No! Don’t touch it!’ said Wright sharply. ‘Mr. Strangeways, give me that syringe.’
Clare whirled round, her face dead-white.
‘Oh, Nigel! Did you—?’
‘It’s all right, love.’ Nigel held up the syringe, still full, for her to see, then handed it to Wright.
‘I’m always knocking things over,’ moaned Clare, quite dazed.
‘Lucky for Mr. Strangeways you are.’
Clare’s rigid face softened. Crumpling, she fell forward into Nigel’s arms, gazed up at him incredulously, and stroked her fingers along his cheek as if to reassure herself that he was still there.
‘What would have happened?’ Her voice was shaking, almost inaudible.
‘Well, a syringe full of vitriol, injected into the sinus—’
Clare laid her trembling hand on Nigel’s mouth, and burst into tears.
When she was calmer, Inspector Wright asked the inevitable question.
‘I don’t know,’ said Nigel. ‘Protheroe and Geraldine both had the bottle in their possession today; I left it behind in—No, what a fool I am! This thing has addled my wits. I finished that bottle, and took a fresh one out of my medicine cupboard before coming along this evening.’
Clare shuddered convulsively in his arms.
‘And who had access to your medicine cupboard?’ asked Wright.
‘Well, it’s in the loo.’ Nigel frowned. ‘The other evening, when Cyprian Gleed came to see me, he asked if he might use it. My goodness, and he—’
Nigel stopped abruptly. He did not want to harrow Clare’s feelings any more, so he refrained from repeating Gleed’s last words to him on that occasion:
‘I’ll let myself out, when I’ve finished. You probably won’t be seeing me again.’
Chapter 15
Close Up
‘BUT WHY SHOULD he do it? Such a foul, vicious thing? It’s what you’d expect of a—a corrupt child.’
‘He is a corrupt child. It was an act of pure spite. I’d wounded his vanity pretty deeply once or twice before that evening he came to my house. And I waded into him unmercifully then. I must say, I hardly blame him—’
‘Oh nonsense, my darling. Don’t be so bloody Christian and understanding. I’d like to toast him over a slow fire.’
Clare and Nigel were breakfasting the next morning. There were shadows under Clare’s eyes, and her long black hair had an enchanting glossiness. She smiled dreamily at Nigel, then seemed to withdraw into herself, with that quality of elusiveness which had captivated him the first time they met.
‘I hope you’re going to keep up this habit of saving my life. That’s twice so far.’
Leaning over, Clare laid her mouth on his and held it there for a long time.
‘Do you know what you are? A cross between a black cat and a white camellia,’ said Nigel.
‘You make me tremble every time you come near me. Still.’
‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’
‘A very good thing.’ Clare rose, and sat down on the other side of the table. ‘I feel like a convalescent. All weak and wondering. Look, the sun’s come out.’
‘Busy old fool.’
‘What’ll happen to him?’
‘Oh, Wright’ll trace where he got the stuff and pull him in for attempting grievous bodily harm or whatever they call it.’
Clare Massinger took a lump of clay and began kneading it with her small, strong fingers.
‘Irresponsibility,’ Nigel continued, ‘that’s Gleed’s trouble. The inability or the refusal to envisage the full consequences of an act. His mother was the same; but she had talent of a sort, to keep her on a more or less level keel.’
‘I knew a child once who strung a piece of wire across a drive to decapitate her governess bicycling back in the dark.’
‘I hope you were soundly thrashed for it.’
Clare coloured deliciously. ‘I never said—Oh, well, yes, I was. Luckily the wire had sagged, through my own incompetence, by the time she got back, so it only caught her front wheel. But my parents took the will for the deed, as they say.’
‘Whither is this gruesome reminiscence tending?’
‘The point is, I’d not have stuck a knife into that governess, or pushed her off a cliff. Yet I was prepared to attempt long-range decapitation. Children have no imagination—I mean, I visualised with great relish the wire whipping off her head; but in a way I didn’t believe it could happen—it was like an experiment that someone else would be bound to stop before it got too dangerous. Children’s imagination is so limited.’
Nigel watched her attentively. The lump of clay, which she absently moulded, was taking the form of a rudimentary horse. ‘A deficient sense of reality. Yes?’
‘It does seem odd to me,’ said Clare in her light, high voice, ‘that a chap who could fix up that long-range, delayed-action thing for you could also walk up to his mother and cut her throat. I’d have expected him to use poison on her, if anything. But perhaps we’ve analysed him all wrong.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Nigel, giving her a non-committal look.
When he got back to his own house, half an hour later, Nigel found a telephone message from Liz Wenham, asking him to go and see her as soon as possible; she would be at home all the morning.
The room in which Miss Wenham received him was lined with books and filled with knick-knacks. She herself, dumpy in a tweed suit of a rather unbecoming pattern, clear-eyed, decisive in manner, resembled more than ever a Victorian blue-stocking or a member of some north-country family with a tradition of sweetness and light—more light than sweetness, perhaps—behind it; one of the great intellectual dynasties which have intermarried and preserved in the raffish modern world an earnestness, a faint academic aroma, a confident moral tone and a general air of unremitting mental hygiene, inherited from their vigorous forebears.
She herself was sitting behind a ponderous reading-stand which, Nigel was at once convinced, had belonged to the famous James W
enham. Indeed, if Cyprian Gleed’s room was a mausoleum of false starts, this one was a museum of successful finishes: the furniture, the photographs, the ornaments, above all the books (autographed, no doubt, by their celebrated authors, with obliging tributes to the Wenham dynasty), conveyed the impression of a solidity too grand to be labelled as smugness.
‘Well, Mr. Strangeways, when is this mess going to be cleared up?’ was Liz Wenham’s crisp opening.
‘In a few days, I think.’
‘The police are satisfied they know the identity of the murderer?’
‘Ye-es, I believe they are.’
‘But you are not satisfied?’
‘It’s not my department. I’m only concerned with the libel trouble.’
Liz Wenham’s grey eyes sparkled frostily. ‘Come, come, Mr. Strangeways, don’t let us be evasive with each other.’
‘Well then. Cyprian Gleed had motive and opportunity. Moreover, he—or someone closely resembling him—was seen leaving the office at 5.40 on the night of the murder.’
‘This is news to me,’ said Liz quickly. A certain fullness in her voice suggested to Nigel that it was good news. He gave her an edited account of Susan’s statement.
‘I shall have to speak to that girl. What was she doing in the packers’ room? Cuddling, I suppose.’ Cuddling might have been equivalent to Babylonian orgies, the way Miss Wenham made it sound.
‘It’s called “necking” nowadays,’ Nigel could not refrain from saying.
‘Really? What an inadequate word! But I didn’t ask you here to discuss erotic synonyms.’ Liz Wenham was looking at him very straightly. ‘You’ll have realised by now that the firm of Wenham & Geraldine means everything to me. I would stop at nothing to preserve its good name.’ Liz Wenham emphasised her remarks by beating her fist on her knee; and there was indeed an almost fanatical look in the grey eyes.
‘Ah,’ said Nigel, smiling pleasantly at her, ‘you’re going to ask me to suppress evidence.’
Liz flushed deeply, but answered without resentment: ‘Not about the—the death of Miss Miles.’ She clenched her fist again. ‘Arthur Geraldine made an extraordinary confession to me last night. I have his permission to pass on the gist of it to you. He did not feel disposed’—Liz looked momentarily uncomfortable—‘to face you directly with it. I understand you had already broached the matter to him.’