Death of a Mystery Writer (13 page)

Miss Cozzens thought: “Surtees, of course. He was sometimes given the key. Otherwise, I suppose you'd have had to steal the key while Sir Oliver was asleep. Which wouldn't be easy, because he locked his door.” She looked with Meredith down to the gardens below. “I'll tell you one thing. The person least likely to have been able to get hold of it was Sir Mark.” Meredith gazed with her at the lonely strolling figure.

“That's the conclusion I've come to,” he said regretfully.

 • • • 

The day was warm rather than hot, and the shadows were already beginning to lengthen when Meredith slipped out a side door and went in the direction he had seen Mark take. The grounds of Wycherley Court were extensive, and undoubtedly gentlemanly. They had never, it seemed, been allowed to go to waste. Meredith (who had been born in the county and whose Welsh accent was an inheritance from his parents, cherished
zealously out of some obscure feelings of tribal loyalty) remembered when the estate had been sold by the Hattersleys—local squires from time fairly immemorial, who had been early in the emigration of their class to enjoy the benefits of birching and low taxation on the Isle of Man. That was about 1950 to 1951, he guessed, and even then the property as a whole was in fairly good shape. Much care had gone into the grounds since then, and much love. Meredith noted a gardener leaning on a spade with an unmistakable air of waiting for knocking-off time. The love, he presumed, had come from Lady Fairleigh.

He found Mark in a little clearing on the far corner of the estate, almost surrounded by elms, which were casting long accusatory fingers of shadow toward the house. He was sitting on a seat, deep in thought, but not too deep to hear Meredith's approach.

“I am sorry, Inspector,” he said, getting up eagerly. “I do apologize. I should have realized you would want to see me. I'd no intention of making you come to search me out.”

His manner, like his words, were apologetic, but it was oddly confident too. His apology was the apology of a man who was quite consciously in charge. Suddenly his air was that of the public school prefect, grown up. Meredith shot one of his quick glances at the face: good-looking, rather full about the lips, the eyes rather dulled. It was an oddly unformed face for a man in his mid-twenties: it was a face from which one might have expected almost anything.

“We can talk here as well as anywhere,” said Meredith, perching birdlike on the long park bench, and looking at Mark with his guileless, confidential smile. “Until my lab boys start getting reports through I can't do much more than go around feeling my way. They're the ones who do all the work these days.”

“But still, you do know it was murder?”

“We know he was poisoned. Nicotine poison. In the decanter.”

“Poor Mother,” said Mark simply. He sat for a few moments, apparently genuinely upset. He took out a packet of cigarettes, put one in his mouth, and lit it. Suddenly Meredith realized
that his hand was shaking. “Nicotine,” he said, with an obvious effort to be cool. “I don't know anything about poisons. Is that a common one?”

“To murder someone with? Not very. But it's easy enough to obtain if you know the way.”

“Poor Mother,” said Mark again, his voice more normal. “All those years putting up with Father, and they end like this.” He paused, and then said: “The press is going to be absolutely foul.”

There was a note of strong feeling in his voice which intrigued Meredith, so he said: “You have had experience of the press?”

“Some,” said Mark. His voice was very quiet. He seemed to be surveying the experiences of his last years as if they were someone else's. “Father attracted reporters like flies to a honey jar. I was the little blob of honey on the plate that got a few stray flies. You can imagine the sort of thing they said about me: first it was ‘fast living,' ‘devil-may-care,' then it was ‘ne'er-do-well,' then it was—well, you can imagine. I was never interesting enough for more than a line or two here and there, but still—yes, I've had more than enough of reporters.”

“The police are supposed to work with the press these days,” said Meredith. “And real little blabbermouths some of us have become, too. But I find, personally, that the best policy is usually to say nothing at all.”

“I was not always in a condition to say nothing at all,” said Mark. His hand, though resting on the arm of the seat, was not quite still. Meredith felt that they were getting on to difficult territory, and tiptoed cautiously on.

“It was lucky for you, at any rate, that you were drunk last night,” he said. Mark looked at him, a direct, troubled look.

“Yes, wasn't it?” he said. “It's odd to think of myself there—present in the body, absent in the mind. I've been like that often enough before, but nothing quite like that has happened while I've been out.”

“Why do you think your brother and your sister took you across to the study?”

“Considerate of them, wasn't it?” Mark's answer came quickly and bitterly. Then he paused and thought for a little. “That's for you to decide. I suppose they'd say they wanted me to be in on the carefree jollity of a birthday dinner at Wycherley Court.”

“And you would say?”

There was a long silence now. “Perhaps they would be quite pleased to have me there, for the finger of scorn to be pointed at,” said Mark at last.

“There is another, even less pleasant possibility,” said Meredith.

“Of course there is,” said Mark loudly, apparently genuinely agitated. “But they are my brother and sister. You don't expect me calmly to chew over with you the possibility of their being—what's the word?—parricides, do you, nicely weighing the pros and cons? It's for you to find out.”

“Of course I don't expect you to do that,” said Meredith, very charming. “But I have to consider the possibility and I've no doubt you will do the same. They, or one of them, may have wanted you there because they hoped you would come round. They may have been banking on the fact that you would be with the rest when the presents were opened, so that we could imagine you, while the rest of the party's attention was diverted, slipping the poison into the decanter. It must be obvious that in any other circumstances you would be prime suspect, in view of your performance at the Prince Albert in Hadley last weekend.”

“Ah, you know about that?”

“I suspect everyone in the area knows about it. I shall make some inquiries about when the gossip started in Wycherley, and when people in the house got to know, but I think you can assume that everyone at the birthday party had heard of it.”

“Odd, that—I don't remember much about it myself. Well, if that was Terence or Bella's little plan, it rather misfired, didn't it?”

“Yes, if it was, it did,” said Meredith noncommittally. Then he turned directly to Mark and asked: “How long have you been drinking so heavily, sir?”

“Oh, years—years and years. When I was seventeen or eighteen
I used to go on occasional benders. From about twenty onward I've needed it. I need it at this moment.”

“But you're not taking it?”

“No.” There was a brief silence. “I feel I need my wits about me. You're implying I could have been intended as—what's the word?—a fall guy. I had the same idea, in the back of my mind. In any case, I don't know what's going on, and I need all the cool thinking I can manage to find out.” Suddenly his brow unfurrowed. “And you know, coming into all this makes a difference.” He waved his hand around the estate stretching like a
Country Life
illustration toward the house, mellow and golden in the distance.

“In what way, sir?”

“In every way. It means I own something. It means I have a stable base, and a way of life mapped out. It means responsibilities, decisions, something solid to do. I don't know whether Father realized it, but it does make a difference.” He paused again, as if the interview with Meredith was part of a heavy session of self-communion which had gone on before he came, and would go on after he left. “If you want to put it crudely, you could say it makes all the difference that he is dead.”

“You drank because he was alive?”

“Oh, yes, that's certainly true. Because I knew that by drinking I would be disappointing him, ruining his plans for me, embarrassing him—insofar as that was possible. I've always been conscious of him, in the background: he's been with me every minute of the day, ever since I can remember.”

The brooding look in the eyes—troubled, turbulent—was that of a man not naturally introspective, trying to come to terms with his own situation.

“You drank because he hated you?” hazarded Meredith, optimistically putting the verb in the past tense. Mark turned, and his expression had changed, lightened, become almost one of wonder.

“Do you know, Inspector, I don't believe he did.”

At Meredith's look of surprise, Mark waved his hand deprecatingly: “Of course, that sounded a bit silly, in view of everything that's gone on between us. And I don't even mean we had a love-hate relationship, either. It's practically impossible to explain what I
do
mean to someone who didn't know Father personally.”

“I'm getting a picture,” said Meredith.

“Yes, but is it the right one—or rather, is the emphasis right? There was the monster that the newspapers made of him, or rather that he made of himself for the newspapers' benefit. Everyone around here can tell you a story based on this monster, and quite a few of them will actually be true. But the important thing is that he was
performing
this role—and enjoying the performance, of course. And this was always true, whatever he did, whatever mood he was in. Last night he'd promised Bella to be good for the birthday dinner, and through the haze I can remember what he was like when I arrived, and when we were having drinks before dinner: he wasn't
being nice,
he was
performing
being nice—a galumphing, hearty
performance.
He was being the stage squire in a William Douglas Home play. And the point about Father was that he loved roles, all sorts of roles. And if you presented him with a possible one, he grabbed it with both hands, and hammed it up to the skies.”

Mark, as if surprised at his own eloquence and insight, suddenly came to a halt, and looked anxiously at Meredith to see if he had understood. Meredith digested the notion slowly. He was wondering whether the picture was a true one, and wondering too what had given this rather ordinary boy such an acute perception.

“So you mean,” he said, “that you, by being—what shall we say?—unsatisfactory, presented him with a role?”

“Exactly.” Mark flung himself back in his seat, and made odd sketching motions with his hands in the air that seemed to be an outline of Oliver Fairleigh's bullfrog body. “A plum role, handed him on a plate: heavy father; outraged Victorian parent; disappointed head of a noble family. Not just a lovely part, but tailor-made for him. And he played it up to the hilt, enjoying every minute.”

“But you think he didn't actually feel anything, any hatred or outrage?”

“That's what I've come to think.” Mark crossed his legs, and turned toward Meredith, like a salesman trying to put over a product. “I don't think Father
felt
very much at all. He was fond of Bella, in his way. Perhaps of Mother too, though he would never have moved a muscle of his body out of consideration for
her
feelings. Beyond that, there was only himself, his comfort and convenience, fending off the boredom of life, creating fuss and kerfuffle, getting into the news, bullying and embarrassing people to
prove
himself in some way or other. But about me, I don't think he felt anything, one way or another—nothing you could analyze and say, ‘This is sincere.'”

“You've obviously thought about it a lot.”

“I have. And I'm not sure I quite saw it like this yesterday, even. But that's how I think it was.”

“And where does this leave you, sir?”

“In what way?”

“Did
you
hate
him?”

“Yes, oh, yes.” There was no sign of reserve or hesitation as Mark stretched back on the bench and admitted this. “I hated his selfishness, his cruelty, his ludicrous snobbery, his publicity-seeking—I hated everything about him. But in the end it may all come back to egotism on my part: I hated him because I sensed he felt nothing about me as a person. Nothing at all. Wasn't conscious of me, and couldn't care less. He made me cringe with loathing.”

The two men sat silent for a moment. Into the silence came an odd sound, like an asthmatic barrel organ tuning up. Across the clearing, waddling, came Cuff, snuffling along with his nose obsessively to the ground, his dim eyes winking with effort. At length he arrived at the seat, smelled in a leisurely, scientific manner up Mark's trouser leg, then with a great grunt of achievement flopped his ungainly body down at his feet and went to sleep.

“The first defector to the new master,” said Mark. He did not sound displeased.

“How have you lived, since you left school?” asked Meredith, unwilling to let the subject of Mark's misspent years drop.

“I went up to Oxford when I was nineteen. Father said it had to be Balliol or Christ Church, and I just scraped into Christ Church—mainly due to Dad's giving them a collection of early-eighteenth-century pamphlets for the library a year or so before I tried my luck. He liked doing deals on that sort of level: he used to say it was impossible to underestimate the power of self-interest.”

“But you didn't take your degree?”

“Good Lord, no. I didn't last more than a term and a half. I was sent down for idleness and drunkenness.” He threw a wry smile in Meredith's direction: “You had to be
very
idle and
very
drunken to be sent down from The House.”