Death of a Mystery Writer (12 page)

“And you—?”

“If you mean, did I get duplicates made for anyone, you can stuff the idea, matey,” said Surtees, taking advantage of Meredith's matiness because it pleased him to be able to give the police a bit of cheek. “I'm the great incorruptible, that's what I am. Or shall we say my loyalty was to Sir Oliver, no one else. It doesn't do to sell your soul too often. Especially not when Sir Oliver had such a very good information service.”

Meredith rose to go. “It's been very interesting,” he said. “Just keep your eyes open in the next few days, will you?”

“Sure thing,” said Surtees ingratiatingly. “Better not ask what it's worth to you, had I? You cops can turn funny about little things like that. Still, if I'm ever in trouble in the future, I can just quote your name, can't I?”

“Of course, of course,” said Meredith at the door, mentally adding: “You can try.”

Back in the study Meredith tried to sort out his impressions. He had already had, before he came, a mental picture of Oliver Fairleigh, culled from local gossip. His morning in Wycherley
Court had not radically altered that impression: the man seemed to have been an unpredictable and erratic tyrant, ruling a disunited and unsatisfactory family. Beyond the family circle, Meredith had no reason to doubt that Oliver Fairleigh was a man with so many enemies that a list of people who might have
vaguely
wanted him out of the way could easily run to three figures. Yet the man must have been more complex than this outline. There was, for instance, the will, the strange decision to leave everything—virtually—to a son he hated.

Inspector Meredith idly went over to the shelf behind the desk at which Oliver Fairleigh had drunk his last toast. Here were ranged, he had already noted, the English first editions of Oliver Fairleigh's works. He took out
Foul Play at the Crossroads:
a photographic cover, sky blue, depicting a fingerpost decorated with a skull, and a witch's broomstick in the foreground. A work full of eye of newt and toe of frog, no doubt. He looked for
Right Royal Murder,
and took it down: a purple plush background, on which was placed the crown of England, stained with blood. An excellent cover, he thought, and a sure seller. Both Macpherson's and their star author had an eye for what would sell. He skimmed along the shelf for
Black Widow.
He missed it, and went back to read the thirty-odd titles methodically. There was none called
Black Widow.
He crossed over to an obscure corner of the room behind the door, where he had observed a serried mass of paperbacks and foreign editions. Here Sir Oliver had kept discreetly out of sight the more sensational editions of his works. Meredith went through them all, eventually having to get down on his hands and knees, there were so many. But there was no book called
Black Widow.

Oliver Fairleigh seemed to have left his wife the copyright of a book that did not exist.

Emerging from the study, with a feeling of having discovered something without having the slightest idea what, Inspector Meredith caught sight of the capable figure of Barbara Cozzens, purposefully cleaving a way from the servants' quarters to the stairs. The brief glimpse he had had of her when he had arrived had suggested to him that here was a woman with no nonsense about her—so much so, perhaps, as to be now and then an uncomfortable person to be with. She was dressed for the day after a death, in a depressing dark brown skirt and severe-cut blouse. Her hair was pulled back into an exemplary bun, and her makeup was sparse and utterly unflamboyant. On the surface she looked like a shorthand-taking machine, and a totally conventional moral entity—but behind the glasses savage little glints of intelligence were to be detected.

“Oh, Miss Cozzens, I wondered if—”

“Of course, Inspector,” she said briskly, hardly even turning round; “if you would like to come up to my office.”

The office, on the first floor, turned out to be a good-sized room—needed to be, in fact, because one wall was lined with filing cabinets, and there was an enormous old cupboard on the opposite side of the room, whose doors were hanging half open as if stuffed to the limits with manuscripts, and aching to vomit some out. A quick glance from his darting eyes showed Meredith that this was indeed the case.

“I'm sorry to have to bother you, Miss Cozzens, when you must be very—”

“Oh, please don't bother with the preliminaries, Inspector,”
said Barbara Cozzens, gesturing him to the second chair and sitting down herself at the desk, as if he were all in a day's work. “I haven't been Oliver Fairleigh's secretary all these years for nothing, you know. Slapdash he may have been, but inevitably one gained a few inklings of police procedure.”

“How many years, actually?”

“Six and a half. I've been responsible for his last seven novels and the eighth to come.”

“And lived here the whole time?”

“That's right. I have a very nice self-contained flat. I'm completely independent.”

Miss Cozzens seemed to insist on this. Was it to mark herself off from the domestic who “lived in,” or to lay emphasis on the distance between herself and the family?

“I gather you were not at dinner last night?”

“No, indeed. It was a family affair—the birthday dinner always is. It was rather unusual for outsiders like the Woodstocks to be invited to it. As for myself, I have only dined with the family two or three times in the last few years. We saw more than enough of each other in the course of the day, more than enough. If I had been invited, I should not have gone.”

“Why?”

“I believe the birthday dinner was the day in the year when Sir Oliver felt that his position as paterfamilias gave him the right to be more than usually unbearable.”

Miss Cozzens's lips slapped together at this into a kind of smile. At Meredith's involuntary raising of the eyebrows, she seemed to sense disapproval, and went on: “I'm being disloyal, do you think? But I think I'm safe in assuming that you will know a little about Sir Oliver's character and habits—either from the newspapers or from local gossip. You will hear all about his relations with his family from somebody or other. As far as I'm concerned, the main thing is that you understand the situation at once, since it is obviously relevant to your inquiries.”

Frankness, then, was to be the order of the day. Meredith took the opportunity to ask her at once about the drinks cabinet.

“It was kept locked, at all times—both it and the one in the lounge. Because of Sir Mark, you know—a dipsomaniac, unfortunately.”

“But Sir Mark didn't live here.”

“No—but you could never tell when he might drop in. In search of alcohol, very often, when the pubs were closed. He was here last Sunday, for instance.”

“Was he now?” Meredith's Welsh intonation was suddenly very pronounced, and Barbara Cozzens had to get a grip on herself to stop from flinching.

“Yes, just in the afternoon. The Fairleighs had been out to lunch with the Woodstocks, whom you'll no doubt meet. Sir Oliver was rather pleased with himself when he came home, and he went to bed to have a rest—to contemplate his own superb destructiveness, I imagine. Mark saw his mother, and stayed around for a bit, but he heard that there was someone to dinner—Mr. Simmington, from Sir Oliver's publishers—so he went away again at about half past six. I imagine he drove himself straight to a pub.”

“I see. But during his visit the drinks will have been locked away, I suppose?”

“Most definitely. They were
always
locked, and Sir Oliver kept the key. The only strong drink around was a bottle of sherry in the desk in the study: just now and then Sir Oliver treated himself to an extra glass—extra to Dr. Leighton's orders, that is. He imagined his wife noted the levels of the bottles, and kept this as a resource in emergencies. It was a polite fiction, in fact: both I and Lady Fairleigh knew about it.”

“You know that the decanter of lakka was poisoned?”

“From what I'd heard it sounded likely.” Miss Cozzens raised her eyebrows in a gesture of refined distaste. “Really, a very melodramatic kind of murder. Quite like one of Sir Oliver's books!” And she shook her head in disapproval.

“Yes, indeed,” said Meredith meditatively: “the toast, the drinking, the collapse. Quite the stuff of detective stories. Was it any particular story you were thinking of?”

Miss Cozzens crinkled her brow—in thought, and perhaps in distaste. “No, I don't think so. It's so difficult to remember: I do my best not to take much in while I take them down. But of course, when one has also to rough type them and then do the fair copy, one does inevitably get to know them. No, I don't think that any of the ones I've had to do with had any murder in them at all like that. In fact, Sir Oliver tended to avoid poison.”

“Why?”

“Dame Agatha used to do it so much better. In any case, it required too much research, and he was congenitally slothful. He preferred more direct, brutal methods.”

“I see. It's a pity. It did occur to me that someone—someone with a sense of humor—might have—”

“Used one of Sir Oliver's methods? Perfectly possible, of course. Though I have the gravest doubts whether any murderer using those books as a model would ever manage to kill anyone, let alone get away with it for any length of time.” Seeing Meredith smile appreciatively, Miss Cozzens preened herself on her sharp wit, and Meredith's quicksilver eyes saw her preening. In a second she was back to her business self. “I'll go through all the novels at once, and see if there is anything reasonably close to what happened last night. After all, there are thirty or more, and I only know about seven or eight at all well. What was the poison used?”

“Nicotine.”

“I see.” Miss Cozzens made a note of it. The murder, it seemed, had now been integrated into her office routine. “I know his methods, so I should be able to skim through them quickly without actually having to read them.”

“Have you read one of his books called
Black Widow
?”

“Black Widow?
There is no such novel.” Barbara Cozzens shook her head very definitely. “I do all the financial side, you know—paperback rights, translations into foreign languages, all that kind of thing. So even if I haven't read them, I've got them all very clearly in my mind—how many times they've been reprinted, how much they've brought in, and so on. There is no book called
Black Widow.”

“And yet it figures in his will.”

“Really? I don't understand.”

“He left
Foul Play at the Crossroads
to his son Terence—”

“Oh, yes, a very profitable number, that.”

“Right Royal Murder
to Bella—”

“The latest. That's going to be a gold mine—a real little gold mine.”

“And
Black Widow
to Lady Fairleigh-Stubbs.”

A flicker, Meredith could swear, went over Miss Cozzens's face, as if she were saying, “Then he must have left all the rest to Mark.” But it was immediately replaced by a furrowed brow, as she set her mind to the matter at hand. “Well, he never used a pseudonym, so it can't be that. Wait—I know. It must be the one for publication after his death. No doubt that's it. He chose it for Lady Fairleigh because he knew it would bring in a nice little bit.”

“Do you mean the one he has just finished, or something?”

“Oh, no, that's called
Murder Upstairs and Downstairs.
That was only finished last week, so it couldn't have figured in the will. No, this is one he held back. I believe he wrote it at some period when he was particularly productive—or facile, you might say. It was before my time, and I never heard what it was called. There were to be two of them—Sir Oliver's mind was very far from original—but he never got around to doing the second. People never think they're going to die, do they? And I'm sure Sir Oliver was convinced he himself could choose the time and manner of his going.”

“Where is the manuscript now?”

“At Macpherson's, I suppose. It's not here.” She waved her arms at the bulging, rickety cupboard. “I have everything here, from first drafts to proof copies. He was always expecting some American library to offer for them, and none ever did. It may look chaotic, but I know perfectly well everything that's there.” She thought for a moment. “Of course, it's just possible it's in the study.”

“Wouldn't you know about it?”

“Not necessarily. This room is mine—my office. The study was
Sir Oliver's. I was called in there, to be recording angel when inspiration struck, usually sometime in the morning.” Her lips again slapped together in a brief, sharp smile. “But we kept to our own areas: I found out very early that this was the only way to keep the peace. And in fact it would have been more than my life was worth to poke around in the study.”

“Well, I'll look around and make inquiries. No doubt it's a blind alley, but it seemed an oddity worth looking into. It will be interesting in any case to talk to his publishers.”

“Mr. Simmington is very intelligent. Knew how to handle Sir Oliver. It's an art one had to develop over the years.”

Inspector Meredith had risen. From the window he saw the eldest son of the victim wandering down from the terrace into the gardens of the house that was now his. “I've no doubt it was an art,” he said. “And Sir Mark, I gather, didn't have it.”

“No, indeed. If anything he deliberately provoked him.”

“One last question,” said Meredith, turning quickly round again to Miss Cozzens and surprising a look of reluctant admiration of Mark's attitude on her face. “Can you tell me who had the best chance of getting at the drinks cupboard in the study?”