C. S. FORESTER
Plain Murder
PENGUIN BOOKS
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Plain Murder
Cecil Scott Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (1899–1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works were the eleven-book Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (1935; filmed in 1951 by John Huston). His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He began his career with the crime novels Payment Deferred and Plain Murder, now reissued in Penguin Modern Classics along with The Pursued, which was lost for over sixty years.
1
The three young men sat together at a marble-topped table in the teashop. Their cups of coffee stood untasted before them. The saucer under Reddy’s cup was half full of coffee, slopped into it by an irritated waitress who missed the usual familiar smirk which Morris wontedly bestowed upon her when he gave his order. Reddy had not noticed this bad piece of service, although normally it would have curled his fastidious lip. He flicked nervously at the ash of his cigarette and looked across the table at the other two, first Morris with his scowling brow, his woolly hair horrid with grease, his eyelid drooping and his mouth pulled to one side to keep the cigarette smoke out of his eyes, and then Oldroyd with his heavy face wrinkled with perplexity.
‘He knows about it all right, then,’ said Morris bitterly.
‘Certain of it,’ said Reddy. ‘I couldn’t have made a mistake. What would he have said that about Hunter for if he didn’t know?’
‘It means the sack,’ said Oldroyd. ‘It does that.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ sneered Morris. ‘God damn it, of course it does. We know what Mac’s like as well as you do, if not better. The minute he comes back from Glasgow old Harrison’ll go trotting in there, and five minutes after that Mac’s buzzer will go, and Maudie will come and fetch us in to get the key of the street. Mac won’t ever let that by, silly old fool he is, with all his notions about “commercial honour” and stuff like that.’
Morris ended by making a noise in the back of his throat indicating profound disgust; he flung himself back in his chair and filled his lungs deep with cigarette smoke.
‘And we’ll be looking for a job,’ said Oldroyd. ‘I’ve been out before and I know what it’s like.’
There was a north-country flavour about his speech: his I’s were softened into Ah’s.
‘Know what it’s like? D’you think I don’t know too?’ said Morris. ‘“Dear Sir. In reply to your advertisement in today’s Daily Express” – bah, I’ve done hundreds of ’em. God, you’re lucky compared to me. I got a wife an’ two nippers, don’t you forget. An’ a fat chance we’ve got of finding another job. “Copies of two recent testimonials.” What sort of testimonials do you think old Mac’s going to give us? Sacked for taking bribes! We’ll be starving in the streets in a fortnight’s time. Jesus, it’ll be cold. I’ve had some. And all I made out of that damned show was three quid – three measly quid, up to date. Just because that blinking fool, Cooper, couldn’t keep his mouth shut.’
He glowered round at the other two, and so evident was the fiendish temper which possessed him that they did not dare remind him of the other factors in the situation which oppressed them with grievances beyond the immediate one of prospective dismissal – they dared not remind him that the whole scheme for extracting bribes from Mr Cooper was of his devising, nor that they had only shared three pounds between the two of them; their rogues’ agreement gave half the spoils to Morris and divided the other half between Reddy and Oldroyd.
Morris’s rage frightened Reddy even more than did the prospect of dismissal; never having been unemployed, and always having had a father and mother at his back, Reddy did not appreciate fully the gnawing fears which were assaulting the other two – hunger and cold were only words to him. Reddy knew his father would be pained and hurt by his ignominious dismissal, but his mother would stand up for him. It might be long before he could buy himself another new suit; it might even mean giving up his beloved motor-bicycle, although such a catastrophe was too stupendous to be really possible; those were realities which lay in the future, while across the table to him was reality in the present – Morris mad with fury, his thick lips writhing round his cigarette and his thick, hairy hands beating on the table.
That may have been Reddy’s first contact with reality in all his twenty-two years of life, for that matter. He was in touch with emotions and possibilities which he had only read about, inappreciatively, before that. It was strangely fascinating as well as terrifying. Morris had always exercised a certain fascination for him, possibly through the contrast of his virility and coarseness compared with his own frail elegance, but now in the hour of defeat the spell was stronger still. Certainly at the moment Reddy felt no regret at having allowed Morris to seduce them into the manipulation of correspondence which had left a clear field for the tenders of the Adelphi Artistic Studio, and had earned them six pounds in secret commissions and their approaching dismissal.
The blind ferocity in Morris’s face changed suddenly to something more deliberate and calculating.
‘By God,’ he said, leaning forward and tapping the table, ‘if we could get Harrison out of this business it’d be all right for us.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Oldroyd blankly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Morris. ‘But if we could— get Mac to fire him instead of us, or get him out of the way some other way somehow. One of us would get Harrison’s job then – eight quid a week, and pickings if you kept your eyes open. And we wouldn’t be on the street, either. God! If only we could do it! Can’t one of you two dam’ fools think of anything?’
‘No,’ replied Oldroyd, after a blank interval of thought, adding, for the sake of his wilting self-respect, ‘And not so much of your dam’ fools, either.’
‘Dam’ fools? Of course we’re all dam’ fools to be in this blasted mess. But we won’t be dam’ fools if we get out of it again. Golly, it would be grand if we could!’
‘No,’ said Oldroyd heavily, ‘there isn’t any way out. We’ve just got to take what’s coming to us, haven’t we, Reddy?’
Reddy nodded, but he was not really in agreement. He was still gazing fascinatedly at Morris’s distorted face.
‘Don’t be a fool and give up the game before you have to,’ expostulated Morris, looking sharply round at Oldroyd. ‘Mac won’t be back at the office until Wednesday. We’ve still got tomorrow to do something about it. Harrison can’t do anything to us on his own. We’ve still got a chance.’
‘Fat lot of chance we’ve got!’ said Oldroyd.
The time which had now elapsed since Reddy had first told the story of his interview with Harrison had given him time to recover some of his fatalistic composure; so much of it, in fact, had returned to him that now he was able to turn
his attention to the nearly cold coffee before him. He gulped it down noisily and replaced the cup with a clatter on the saucer. Morris sipped at his.
‘God! I can’t drink that stuff,’ he said, and pushed the cup away.
Oldroyd did not even taste his. Morris looked up at the clock.
‘Look at the time! I’ll have to bunk to get the 6.20. Give us our tickets, please, miss. So long, you fellows. Keep your pecker up, Oldroyd, old man. We’re not dead yet.’
And with that he was gone, forgetting his own exasperation for the moment in the flurry of hurrying out, paying his bill, and scrambling through the traffic in the Strand over to Charing Cross Station. It only returned to him while standing in a packed compartment in the train, crawling along through the first fog of the year; by the time he reached home he was in a bad enough temper to quarrel for the thousandth time with his wife.
2
Standing in the railway carriage he constituted what a catholic taste might term a fine figure of a man – big and burly in his big overcoat, with plenty of colour in his dark, rather fleshy cheeks. His large nose was a little hooked; his thick lips were red and mobile; his dark eyes were intelligent but sly. The force of his personality was indubitable, he was clearly a man of energy and courage. But no cautious man would say it was an honest face; there was shiftiness to be read there, unscrupulousness, perhaps, and there was in no way any indication of intellect. And at the moment, as it had been when young Reddy had been so impressed, it was marked by every sign of violent bad temper. Nor was that bad temper soothed by the crowded state of the train, nor by the delays caused by the fog. Morris was stimulated to viciousness by the time he reached his station.
He elbowed his way out of the carriage, showing small regard for other people’s toes and other people’s ribs; he forced his way along the crawling queue which was passing through the ticket collector’s gate, and then he crossed the main road and strode in a fury of bad-tempered haste up the tremendously steep hill to his house. It was an incline which would have tested the lungs of a man in good training when taken, as Morris did it, at five and a half miles an hour; Morris, a little too fat and quite out of condition, was gasping by the time he reached the top. That was nothing unusual, however. Morris was nearly always bad-tempered when he was going home, and he usually took that hill too fast in consequence.
At the top he was in the heart of the New Estate, as everyone about called it, despite the fact that it was already five years old. From the point of vantage at the top of the hill one could look round and down at hundreds of little houses of white stucco, red roofed, pitiful little places, terraces and crescents and squares; pitiful because they represented an attempt on the part of the County Council to build houses (which could be rented at prices not much too expensive for artisans, without imposing too great a burden on the rates) bearing the hallmarks of advanced civilization at a cost which utterly precluded them. They were semi-detached houses, each couple standing proudly in its own plot of land, but pathetic because if the houses had been big enough to be really habitable they would have filled their particular plots to overflowing. They had casement windows, which were quite pretty, save for the objection that to clean the outside of the hinged window one needed to climb up to it with a ladder from without, for to do it from within called for the services of someone with an arm nine feet long. The boilers were scientifically arranged so that the sitting-room fire heated the water, but by the time three people and their furniture were established in the house there was not an atom of space left in which to store the coal for the sitting-room fire.
Morris had meditated on these facts often enough before, and they had ceased actively to annoy him, but perhaps they contributed to the feeling of irritation which so often urged him up the hill faster than he ought to go. Tonight, perhaps, faced with the prospect of dismissal and starvation, he was not so much affected by them. He looked neither to the right nor to the left as he strode up the hill; he swung round at the very summit, for the corner house here, looking out across the Estate and the valley of the Mead clear to London, twelve miles away, was where he lived; had been his home for four years now.
A stride from the front door took him into the middle of the hall. He hung up his hat and coat and another stride took him into the sitting-room.
‘Isn’t that kid in bed yet?’ was Morris’s way of saying good evening to his wife. ‘It’s seven o’clock.’
‘She’s company for when you come back late like this,’ retorted Mrs Morris. There never was a speech yet to which Mrs Morris had not a ready and devastating answer. That was one of the reasons of the quarrels between the two.
‘Late?’ demanded Morris. ‘Call this late? Only luck I wasn’t a dam’ sight later. Kept at the office, fog on the line, it might have been ten by the time I got here. What’ve you got for my tea?’
‘Nice bit of haddock,’ said Mrs Morris, cautiously defensive. Food was a matter of so much interest to her husband that she had always to be ready to defend herself from his charges of feeding him insufficiently or unsuitably.
‘Haddock? I’ll have it now. No, put that kid to bed first.’
Molly, his daughter, was kneeling on a chair at the table scribbling on a piece of paper with a pencil. At any moment she might come and ask him to draw a horse for her, or a cat, or an engine. Molly have never learned that her father had no desire whatever to draw horses for her.
There had once been a time, earlier in their married life, when symptoms of bad temper on her husband’s part had had a subduing effect on his wife, spurring her to haste in obeying his wishes, causing her to walk on tiptoe about the room, to give him soft answers, to be in evident awe of him. But that had passed now. Mary Morris had learned to ‘stand up’ for herself, as she put it, to counter commands with refusals, anger with defiance. Perhaps this had been partly because she did not love her husband so much now; certainly one cause was that she did not respect him so much now that she knew him better; but the main reason, perhaps, was that a quarrel did at least import some spice of variety into an otherwise drab life.
‘No,’ said Mary, ‘let her stay up. She ain’t doing any harm.’
‘Seven o’clock is late enough for a kid her age. Bedtime, Molly.’
Molly looked round at him and then went on scribbling. As far back as her memory went there had been no need for instant obedience to one parent when the other was in opposition, and that was the usual state of affairs.
‘Did you hear me, Molly?’ thundered Morris.
This was a little more serious. Molly looked up to judge her mother’s attitude before she went on scribbling again.
‘God bless my soul!’ said Morris, turning towards her.
But before he reached her her mother had darted in between them.
‘Don’t touch her,’ she said, drawing up her skinny figure undismayed before his overbearing bulk. ‘Don’t you dare touch her. She’s to go to bed when I say. I’m her mother.’
‘Yes, you’re her mother, you—’
The quarrel was well started now, on a familiar opening gambit. It developed on familiar lines; it ended half an hour later in a familiar stalemate, long after Molly had grown tired of scribbling. She had merely climbed down from her chair to play her usual obscure game of houses beneath the table, wherein the footstool represented not merely the entire household furniture, but visitors and tradesmen and, when necessary, the mistress of the house as well. The quarrel which raged over her head meant entirely nothing to her; it was as familiar a part of her world as was the hearthrug or the sideboard. The quarrel eddied round the sitting-room; it continued with long range indirect fire through the open door when Mrs Morris went into the kitchen and Morris flung himself into the armchair; it died away when Mrs Morris’s dropping shots only called forth grunts and wordless noises of disgust from her husband; it seemed over when Mrs Morris reached below the table, brought Molly out, and started her up the st
airs. Thereupon it promptly flared up again when Morris called some jeering remark after her. Mrs Morris could not possibly leave her husband the last word; she bounced down the stairs again and flung open the sitting-room door. Molly played on the stairs for five minutes before her mother returned and bustled her up to bed.
When Mrs Morris finally descended she found her husband sitting at the fireside silent and morose. She cooked his supper for him, put it on the table, and said, ‘It’s ready.’ He heaved himself up to the table, ate and drank without a word, and went back in silence to his armchair. He was so subdued and depressed, in fact, that Mrs Morris credited herself with a victory unusually decisive in the recent argument, and felt a little pleased glow of achievement in consequence, which lasted her all the rest of the evening while she washed up and while she sat mending beside the fire.
Morris sat opposite her, chin in hand. He did not feel any urge that evening to listen to the wireless; he did not want to look again through the morning paper, nor even to put the advertisements in the latter through his usual critical examination. His sanguine temperament had led him to forget his troubles during his argument with his wife, but they returned with new force while she was upstairs putting Molly to bed. When, over his cup of coffee, he had described to Oldroyd so rhetorically the certainty and the unpleasantness of unemployment, he himself had not been so much affected by the prospect he was describing. Fear had been overlain by the irritation caused by the failure of his scheme for raising secret commissions. But fear came into its own now. Morris had no illusions regarding the fate of a city clerk dismissed with disgrace. His throat shut up a little, he felt a difficulty in breathing, as he realized in all its horror the imminence of dismissal, of tramping streets looking for work, of standing elbow to elbow with seedy out of works scanning the ‘Situations Vacant’ columns of the newspapers in the Free Library. He had tasted cold and hunger before, and he shrank with terror, even he, big burly Charlie Morris, from encountering them again. He felt suddenly positively sick with fear. Terror rippled down his skin even while he hunched himself closer to the fire’s comfortable warmth. All men have their secret fear; Morris had discovered his only now that it was too late to save himself by mending his ways. He cursed himself for a fool even while he blanched with fear.