Corridors of Death (11 page)

‘Well, sir. You can hardly expect him to be very happy about his wife’s death.’

‘Of course not. But I don’t like his remarks about his wife having been murdered by some nob.’

‘I’m afraid he’s probably right,’ said Milton. ‘It’s a pretty distinguished short-list.’

‘The Commissioner’s been on again,’ said the A.C. ‘The Prime Minister is demanding a quick conclusion to the whole business and wants to know if we’ve got our best men on the job. I must tell you plainly that I thought again about putting a Chief Superintendent onto it, but I’ve decided against it. Nobody could have got more out of those people yesterday than you did. I’m very surprised. I’d have expected them to try to cover things up more. You must have played the interrogations very well.’

Milton tried to look modest. ‘I expect I was just lucky in what I asked them, sir,’ he said, hoping he wouldn’t be believed, and that it would indeed be put down to god-like intuition.

‘Nothing else we can usefully talk about then?’ asked the A.C. ‘Who are you seeing next?’

‘Gladys Bradley’s husband; Lady Clark and her son; and Alfred Shaw and Martin Jenkins. I don’t need to see Stafford at the moment. I had a very open discussion with him yesterday.’

‘Why are you bothering about Jenkins? He couldn’t have killed Mrs Bradley.’

‘There’s just that possible link-up with Lady Clark,’ said Milton apologetically.

‘Oh, that. You’re surely not going to believe a silly piece of malice like that postcard. Someone’s trying to draw you off the proper scent, or, more likely, it’s somebody’s idea of a joke and nothing whatever to do with the case.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, sir, but I wouldn’t feel easy unless I checked up on it.’

‘If you must. But go easily now. I don’t want either of them upset. You haven’t forgotten the way Jenkins carried on over the fights between the police and a few of his members on the picket-line in Colchester last year.’

‘No, sir,’ said Milton, gritting his teeth. ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

‘All right. Carry on. But for God’s sake don’t let there be any more murders.’

The A.C. must be in a real state of jitters if he’s coming out with that sort of stuff
, Milton reflected charitably as he began to shuffle papers back at his own desk. How the hell was he supposed to get any information out of Lady Clark or Jenkins if he was worrying about possible complaints? And sweet Jesus, how was he to stop any more murders without locking up all the suspects? It would be highly popular with the Prime Minister if he locked up Nixon, Wells, Parkinson and, to be on the safe side, Alf Shaw, Stafford, Jenkins, Lady Clark and Nigel. He sloughed off his self-pity. If Amiss could take risks with his career, so could he.

17

Mr Bradley was, if anything, worse than Milton had expected from the accounts he had heard. He was a large, angry-looking man, with rather spiteful little eyes. Milton had become so accustomed in only a couple of days to the suavity of the people he had had to interview that he was momentarily taken aback by Bradley’s belligerence. He was subjected to a tirade on his incompetence in letting murderers run loose around the place looking for innocent victims before he was finally, grudgingly led into the front room of the little terraced house.

It was incredibly untidy. Women’s magazines, paperback romances, empty beer bottles, knitting patterns, piles of laundry and old copies of racing papers jostled each other on all available surfaces. Gladys was obviously no more efficient here than at work, he thought, though from the indifference Bradley exhibited in shoving a pile of odds and ends off an armchair, it didn’t seem as if she had much incentive to be house-proud. He felt that sense of depression which always gripped him at the sight of the personal belongings of someone who has died unexpectedly. The muddy-coloured piece of knitting at his feet was bad enough; the chastely-kissing couples on the covers of the romantic novels were worse. And the complete charmlessness of Bradley made Gladys’s life seem too pathetic to be contemplated.

He thought Bradley was going to hit him when he asked him where he had been at lunchtime the previous day.

‘My old woman is killed by some fucking lunatic up there and you have the nerve to ask me what I was doing. I suppose you think I killed that Clark as well. Maybe you think I thought they were having it off. I don’t have to put up with this fucking treatment. Get out of here.’

It took all Milton’s much-vaunted tact to quieten him down and convince him that these were merely routine questions. Bradley eventually admitted to having spent lunchtime in the neighbouring pub with a couple of mates. He didn’t have a job at the moment. Had to rely on the wife’s pay packet. Wouldn’t even have that now, he added tastelessly.

And you couldn’t even bother to tidy up the house or do the shopping while she was at work
, Milton wanted to say. The fellow was a monster. Oafish, brutal, greedy and lazy. Instead he took the names of the men Bradley had been with and began to ask him if Gladys had said anything about her meeting with Sir Nicholas on Monday morning.

Bradley threw up his hands. ‘How can I be expected to remember everything she rabbited on about. Half the time none of it made sense.’

‘If you could just cast your mind back to Monday night, sir, I would be greatly obliged. We are reasonably sure that whoever killed your wife also killed Sir Nicholas, and she must have seen or heard something that made her a threat to the murderer.’

Bradley sat and thought for a minute or two. In repose his face was different – almost pleasant. He might be quite amiable in the pub, thought Milton.

‘She said something about a row.’

‘With whom, sir?’

‘No. She didn’t have the row. She heard some fellow arguing with Clark about something. I don’t remember what it was about. I was watching television at the time and she was just going on.’

‘Can you remember anything at all, sir?’

‘She said something like that she was so embarrassed because she didn’t know whether to go into the room or not. She was supposed to see him and she could hear him from the corridor.’

‘Did she see who it was with Clark?’

‘Don’t remember.’

Milton pressed on for a while, but he eventually realized that Bradley wasn’t going to come up with any more. If Gladys had mentioned any names, Bradley hadn’t listened. There was no point in going on. He promised to let Milton know if he remembered anything else, but made it clear that there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of his doing so.

Milton got up to go. Bradley looked up and said unexpectedly. ‘She looked all right when I had to identify her last night. As if she didn’t know what happened. Do you think she knew what was going to be done to her?’

‘No, sir. I’m sure she didn’t.’

‘Nobody told me how it happened.’

‘We’re pretty clear that she walked into the room with the murderer of her own free will and that she was stabbed from behind as she was looking out of the window.’

‘You mean this geezer was someone she knew?’

‘Well, if not knew, would have trusted because he seemed all right.’

‘You’re telling me that she trusted someone she had heard arguing with Clark a few minutes before he was murdered?’

‘Perhaps she didn’t realize the implications, sir.’

‘The poor stupid bitch,’ said Bradley. ‘The poor stupid bitch. She didn’t know anything, did she? She went on about how nice it was to work with gentlemen. Nearest thing she ever got to one of her bloody silly love books.’ And to Milton’s consternation, he began to cry.

It was many long minutes before he wiped his eyes and pulled himself together. Milton thought he must never have cried before – he was so incapable of controlling it. He kept repeating ‘poor stupid bitch’ through his tears and Milton realized it was an endearment. When he finally looked up he asked simply, ‘What am I going to do on my own?’

Milton couldn’t cope. He could only hope that some of his mates would rise to the occasion and restore Bradley to his old aggressive self. He could offer nothing except platitudes which made him wince. He walked away from the mean little house with a feeling of release and a wonder at the many forms in which love manifested itself. At least Amiss would be glad to know that there was somebody who would miss Gladys.

18

Lady Clark’s welcome was as different from Bradley’s as was her house. She greeted him in a reserved but courteous way on the threshold of her elegant Georgian house in a South Kensington square.

Sir Nicholas certainly had taste. Milton gave him that. Classy was the word. A classy wife and a classy house. She was a bit insipid for his taste, the blonde hair and the eyes a bit too light, the features a bit too narrow and the manner a bit too apologetic. But she certainly had style.

So had the interior of the house. Milton had seen it a hundred times in glossy magazines. Pale walls, good furniture, curtains and sofa coverings blended subtly and seemed to enhance each other. There were stretches of highly polished surfaces bearing innumerable pieces of expensive-looking silver and pottery. Not a reproduction in sight, thought Milton, looking round at the watercolours which dominated two of the walls. There had to be money here as well as taste. Surely you couldn’t produce that sort of effect on even a senior civil-servant’s salary. He knew they were always being accused of bleeding the country white, but they couldn’t be doing it to the level necessary to finance this. This house stank of money – it had to be inherited. Was it the wife’s? He didn’t think Sir Nicholas came from that sort of background. In a cursory glance at
Who’s Who
he had noticed that he had been educated at a state school – a fact which had surprised him at the time since he had a vague belief that all top civil servants were public-school chaps.

Lady Clark put him sitting in one of the mustard sofas and offered him coffee. Milton accepted gratefully. He was still feeling some emotional exhaustion from his interview with Bradley. She disappeared. He wondered if the establishment ran to servants, and decided not. With the shortage of domestics these days it would be hard to imagine one staying in a house which contained Sir Nicholas. A daily cleaning woman, maybe, who could be kept away from him.

Lady Clark re-entered carrying a silver tray. The cups, Milton noted apprehensively, were small and looked valuable. His and Ann’s taste lay more towards objects that you didn’t mind dropping. He hated the feeling of strain one got from handling other people’s treasured possessions. He was inclined to be rather clumsy at the best of times, and the fear of breaking one of the cups or spilling coffee on the off-white wool carpet was going to take away any benefit he might have had from a quick injection of caffeine. His normal sense of proportion reasserted itself while she was plying him with biscuits. It was pretty silly to worry about spoiling someone’s carpet when you should be worrying instead about how to ask them about a love affair you weren’t supposed to know about.

He asked her first if she had any idea of who might have wanted to kill her husband. She didn’t. Nicholas could, she admitted, sometimes be a bit difficult. She had a feeling that he didn’t get on with all his colleagues. But then, who did?

Cul-de-sac number one
, thought Milton. Then he had his flash of inspiration.

‘Did he often bring work home from the office?’

‘Oh, yes. All the time. He worked very hard.’

‘Can you tell me if he brought any work home last weekend?’

‘Yes, he did. He had to write a speech for his Secretary of State. I don’t really understand why. I thought he had lots of staff to do that kind of thing.’

‘Could he type, Lady Clark?’

‘Oh, no. But I used to type things for him sometimes. I was a secretary once. I typed out the speech for him on Sunday.’

‘I’m sorry to ask you this, but could I see any notes he left? I’m anxious to get all possible details on what he was doing during the days immediately preceding his death.’

Lady Clark was too well-trained to question this. She led him obediently to Sir Nicholas’s study. He looked round, hoping for some kind of insight into the man whose behaviour was still puzzling him. What were his most private and treasured possessions? What kind of books did he read? Was he as ascetic in private life as he seemed to be in public?

First he had to go throught the motions of looking through the notes for the speech. He wasn’t surprised by what he found. The original – correct – speech was lying neatly on the desk beside an immaculately handwritten sheaf of papers. He looked quickly through the two versions and saw the differences in figures, the changes of emphasis and all the other alterations that Amiss had told him about.

‘I don’t see the typewriter.’

‘Oh, no. That’s in my room. Nicholas couldn’t bear the noise and in any case he liked to be entirely private in here. It’s one of those golfball machines, you know. The ones with the replaceable typefaces. We had to have one of those because Nicholas used Greek quite a lot. I’m afraid I was a bit stupid with the Greek. I always thought it would be easier for everyone if he used English all the time.’

‘Do you mind if I look around? You never know where you may find a clue,’ he said fatuously. Lady Clark was impressed. ‘I’ll leave you here for a while, Superintendent. Come and join me when you’ve finished.’

He looked appraisingly around the room. It was so different from the drawing-room that he was taken aback. Perhaps that reflected her personality and this his. If so, he was a strange man indeed. There was a whole wall of paintings – mostly reproductions here – which Milton found profoundly disturbing. Munch he recognized. And a Grosz. He disliked both of them. But if their view of the world seemed a bit bleak, they were positively cheery beside some of the ones he didn’t recognize. He looked closely at a violently depicted mouth out of which seemed to be coming screams of agony. Francis Bacon. Agony and despair. Of course. That was the keynote of the collection. Was he simply a sadist? No. Amiss had said something about Sir Nicholas’s pastime being pulling wings off Assistant Secretaries, but that seemed to be more a matter of expressing disdain for his intellectual inferiors. Certainly there were no dismembered limbs in his picture collection – no Bosch, no Goya.