Crime Writers and Other Animals (12 page)

‘Oh!' Lady Cynthia's soft hand leapt in alarm to her ruby lips, and beneath the fine silk of her evening gown her bosom heaved. ‘How beyond words ghastly if that should happen! Wenceslas,' she interrogated in a hushed voice, ‘are you suggesting that I myself am at risk from this bounder?'

‘Not while I am here to protect you, milady,' he responded with a gallant bow. ‘You may be no more than a feeble woman but—'

‘This is horribly sexist,' said Juanita Rainbird, her objections no longer satisfied by the continuous notes she was scribbling.

‘Is it?' asked Tilson Gutteridge innocently. ‘I actually thought it was rather sexy.'

The editor looked at him with distaste. Tilson Gutteridge seemed to have taken up squatting rights in her office. His tweed jacket was spread untidily across the back of his chair. The braces over his checked shirt were not trendy nineties braces; their perished elastic was reminiscent rather of the truss industry. The tobacco staleness that hung around him seemed to intensify the longer he spent in the room.

Juanita Rainbird wished she had never got into her current situation, having to spend long hours closeted with a man every detail of whose character she loathed. But there was no alternative. She needed to play for time, stretch out the line-by-line copy-editing of Eunice Brock's manuscript until she could see the way out of her dilemma. Because, if she wanted to keep her job, a way out had to be found.

She had made some headway in her investigations. Long hours of research at the Family Records Centre in Farringdon had finally yielded the undeniable fact of a birth certificate. Eunice Brock, under her real name of Phyllis Townley, had given birth to a male child in September 1927. No father's name was recorded.

Unearthing that information, though in one way satisfying, had at the same time been dispiriting, because it strengthened the possibility that Tilson Gutteridge was telling the truth. Proof that Eunice Brock had never had a son would have provided much more comfort.

Finding records of the baby's adoption was proving considerably more difficult, and Juanita Rainbird was beginning to suspect deliberate obfuscation. At the time of her son's birth Eunice Brock was already a published author and something of a celebrity, so it was possible that she had intentionally clouded the waters to prevent any successful probing into her shameful lapse.

Juanita could not at that moment see what the next step of her investigation should be. Her eye strayed to the shelf of hardbacks on the wall and the thought she had been trying half-heartedly to suppress for some days bubbled back to the surface of her mind.

‘If he were to die . . .' Keith Chappick had said, ‘. . . our problem would be at an end.'

As a crime editor, Juanita Rainbird was extremely well versed in the means of murder. The fantasy methods of crime fiction's Golden Age – injecting air bubbles into veins, high musical notes shattering glass containers of poisonous gases – had given way to greater realism in contemporary examples of the genre. If Juanita ever did decide to murder someone, the works she had edited offered a rich variety of ways to achieve that end.

‘So . . . are you suggesting it should be rewritten?'

Tilson Gutteridge's words brought her out of her reverie and back to the typescript. ‘Well, I don't like it.'

‘That's not the point.'

‘All its attitudes are very demeaning and diminishing to women.'

‘That's not the point either. And I would draw your attention to the fact that it was written by a woman – my mother, as it happens.'

‘Yes, but she was simply conforming to the phallocentric norms of the period. She didn't dare write Lady Cynthia as an assured, assertive woman, so she made her a pathetic little bit of fluff.'

‘Actually, it's rather important for the plot that Lady Cynthia's a pathetic little bit of fluff. For God's sake, why shouldn't Eunice Brock write about a stupid woman? Stupid women do exist, you know.'

Tilson Gutteridge looked at Juanita Rainbird very directly as he said this last sentence; there was an edge of insolence in his expression. She turned away, as if suddenly interested in the one Christmas card on her desk. Its message was ‘Happy Holidays'. (Juanita had thrown all cards with specifically Christian messages straight into the bin; she did not believe in prescriptive religion and had no wish to offend people of other faiths.)

Once again it was borne in on her what an utterly hateful man Tilson Gutteridge was. At times she didn't think she'd have any problem with her conscience if she did have to end up murdering him.

And, if she couldn't get another lead in her investigation, she probably would have to end up murdering him.

‘Shall we press on?' he said rather tetchily, and once again his nicotine-stained finger traced along the lines of typescript.

‘You may be no more than a feeble woman, but with me by your side you'd be safe in a jungle full of man-eating fuzzy-wuzzies.'

‘We can't have that!' Juanita Rainbird objected instinctively.

‘Offend vegetarians, will it?' Tilson Gutteridge baited her.

‘It will offend people of alternative – though no less viable – pigmentation.'

‘Oh, for God's sake! You can't pretend black people aren't black. When I was at school, there was a black chap in my class and his nickname was “Fuzzy-Wuzzy”. Everyone called him that. He didn't mind – or at least he never said he minded.'

Juanita prepared to embark on her lecture about how sensibilities had changed, but thought better of it. Instead, she asked casually, ‘Where were you at school, actually, Mr Gutteridge?'

‘Public school called Whittinghams. South London. You heard of it?'

‘No.'

‘Not surprising. It closed during the war. Never reopened.'

‘Oh, right,' said Juanita Rainbird, carefully salting away the information.

‘Now excuse me . . . just got to see a man about a dog.'

Tilson Gutteridge's trips to the Gents were becoming ever more frequent, and each time he used the same odious, arch euphemism. Prostate trouble, Juanita surmised without great interest.

Only when he was out of the room did she realize it was the first time he'd not taken his jacket with him. While this confounded her conjecture that he kept a half-bottle of Scotch in the pocket, it did also open up new investigative possibilities.

She had no conscience about going through Tilson Gutteridge's pockets. Moral qualms prompted by such a minor offence would be pretty specious from someone who was contemplating the option of murder.

The jacket pockets, as she could have predicted, were full of unpleasantness. A handkerchief stained with snot and the nicotine dottle from his pipe. The pipe itself, which would probably be banned in any civilized country on environmental grounds. Some half-sucked peppermints, and other bits of fluff whose precise provenance she did not wish to know.

And an old diary. A 1989 diary, which had clearly been kept because its owner had been too lazy to transfer the telephone numbers in the January of 1990 and of every other year since.

It was to this section that Juanita Rainbird hastily flicked the pages. Few of the addresses and phone numbers had any relevance for her.

The one she did note down, however, belonged to ‘BREEN, Horace – Old Whittinghamians Association'.

By the time Tilson Gutteridge returned from the Gents, trying once again to wheedle an Italian lunch ‘with a decent bottle of red wine' out of Krieper .& Thoday, the diary was innocently back in his jacket pocket.

The voice on the answerphone at Horace Breen's number sounded incredibly old, and when Juanita Rainbird met him at a pub in Dulwich, the reality of the man matched. He must have been well into his eighties, probably once as tall as Tilson Gutteridge, but now bent and shrunken. His face and hands were blotched and freckled; his pale milky eyes peered through thick glasses; and the flat mat of a toupee perched on top of his head seemed to accentuate rather than disguise his age. A shiny pinstriped suit hung off his wire-coat-hanger shoulders. He wore a blue and yellow striped tie, which in his first sentence he identified as ‘the Old Whittinghamians'.

He offered the tiresome resistance of his generation to Juanita Rainbird's offer of a drink. ‘No, surely it's down to us chaps to buy drinks for the pretty little ladies, not the other way—' But she had no difficulty in cutting through all that. Walking from the door to their table seemed to have consumed his limited stock of energy; the journey to the bar and back would have crippled him.

As she ordered the requested half of bitter and her own habitual Perrier, she looked covertly back at the wizened figure and congratulated herself on her luck. If Horace Breen did hold the key to Tilson Gutteridge's past, she'd been fortunate to catch the old man before he enrolled in that great Old Boys' Club in the sky.

Horace Breen thanked her with excessive gallantry for the drink, taking one sip and then ignoring it for the rest of their conversation.

‘I'm delighted to find someone of your generation interested in the history of Whittinghams. You see, I devoted my whole life to the school. I was there as a pupil, then I taught Latin and Greek for many years, and finally acted as bursar. No, splendid to know that a young person is drawn to the history of Whittinghams. Particularly someone in publishing. You say you think there might be a book in it?'

‘Yes,' Juanita Rainbird replied, confirming the lie she had used to engineer their meeting.

‘Well, I suppose there wouldn't be that many people still around who'd be interested, but I can assure you that those who do survive would appreciate the book enormously.' He let out a wheezy chuckle. ‘I wouldn't hold out hopes for a “bestseller”,' he separated the word out with racy daring, ‘but I think I can guarantee you a
succès d'estime
.'

‘Excellent. Now could we—?'

‘Of course, the foundation of the school goes back to the seventeenth century. In 1692, Thomas Wooltrap, merchant of the City of London, made an endowment for the education of twelve impoverished young scholars, “that they might enjoy the benefits bestowed by a knowledge of the classical authors.” And for the first hundred and seventy years of the school's existence . . .'

Juanita Rainbird had to endure getting on for an hour of this before she could divert the conversation in her desired direction. Why, she wondered bitterly, had it become her fate to spend long hours closeted with boring old men?

All too readily the answer supplied itself. Because she wanted to keep her job. And because, if she didn't solve the Tilson Gutteridge problem, Keith Chappick would have not the tiniest qualm about sacking another editor.

This thought spurred her to interruption. ‘When you were bursar, Mr Breen, were you in charge of the collection of fees?'

He looked somewhat taken aback and disappointed by her brusqueness, but replied meekly that such had indeed been his duties.

‘And presumably the fees would be paid in a variety of different ways? From a variety of different sources?'

‘Yes.'

‘I mean, some directly from parents, from grandparents, from family trusts, solicitors and so on . . .?'

‘Indeed.'

‘Mr Breen, did it ever happen that a boy's fees were paid secretly?'

‘How exactly do you mean – “secretly”, Miss Rainbird?'

‘I mean, say, in the case of an illegitimate child . . . Did it ever happen that you were asked to be discreet about the actual source of the fees?'

Horace Breen's old-world values were deeply offended. ‘If that is the sort of book Krieper & Thoday are planning to publish about Whittinghams, I'm afraid I would feel honour bound to dissociate myself from—'

‘No, Mr Breen. My question is relevant, I promise, and nothing to do with muck-raking. Specifically,' she moved speedily on, ‘I'm interested in a boy who would have started at the school round 1939, 1940 . . . Do you remember individual pupils?'

This question was a challenge to his professional pride. Drawing himself up – or at least as much as it was possible for someone so shrivelled to draw himself up – he asserted that he remembered every boy in precise detail.

‘The one I wanted to ask about was called Gutteridge.'

The old man looked blank.

‘Tilson Gutteridge.'

‘Tilson Gutteridge?' he echoed.

The total lack of recognition in his voice brought a flutter of hope to Juanita Rainbird. ‘Yes,' she confirmed breathlessly.

‘I'm sorry. There was no pupil at Whittinghams of that name in all the time I was at the school.'

‘Are you sure?'

Once again she'd offended him. ‘Of course I'm sure, Miss Rainbird! Was this imagined Gutteridge boy the one on whose legitimacy you were casting doubt?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, since he didn't exist, the details of his parentage becomes rather irrelevant, so far as I can see.'

‘Mm . . .'

‘Of course, in the period we're talking about, illegitimacy was a rather more serious matter than it is in these benighted days. And yes, as you suggested, a parent in such unfortunate circumstances might have obscured the issue of who was actually paying the fees.'

‘Did that happen often, Mr Breen?'

‘At Whittinghams? Good heavens, no. It certainly wasn't that sort of school. In fact, I can only recall one instance of illegitimacy in all the time I was there.'

‘When was that?'

‘Round the period we are talking about. During the War. Just before the school so sadly closed. There was one pupil called Crabbett. Crabbett, P. J. Nice lad. Very successful in the school plays – gave a lovely Titania, I recall, and then went on, I gather, to take up the theatre as a profession – one would have hoped for rather better from an Old Whittinghamian. Still, maybe blood will out. He was illegitimate, you see, having been adopted soon after birth, but, er . . .'