Death of a Mystery Writer (16 page)

Mr. Simmington blinked again, and remained sunk in anemic thought for a few seconds. “I'm sorry, Inspector, but it was as I said. He definitely locked up before we left the study. But of course, he drank a lot—as a general rule, I mean. Very likely some other time during the week he could have forgotten to lock it.”

Meredith shook his head. “There again, that seems ruled out. Apparently he only drank liqueurs at weekends. Some sort of compromise with doctor's orders, I believe.”

Mr. Simmington shook his sandy head dubiously. “Well, I'm surprised to hear it. I wouldn't have thought Oliver Fairleigh had so much self-discipline. I must say he always struck me as a man
who would do exactly what he wanted to do—and damn the consequences.”

“Yes,” agreed Meredith, “that's the impression the various accounts of him have made on me. But still, people seem to agree that by and large he stuck to his regimen. How many glasses of lakka did he have?”

“Just the one, I think.”

“And you didn't leave the study at any time?”

“No, we neither of us left it. I wasn't there for any length of time because frankly I didn't want to outstay my welcome. Oliver Fairleigh was the sort of man who could have found some very unpleasant way of making that clear to one. He was very quick at registering boredom. We once dined with him and a bishop who'd done a book in our popular religious series, and Sir Oliver went to sleep during the main course. So I started to make time-to-go noises quite early, and he took me to the main door and saw me off down the steps. He could well have gone back to the study and had another glass or so after I'd gone.”

“True,” said Meredith. “But come to that, we've no evidence of Mark Fairleigh-Stubbs going back to the house between that Sunday and the succeeding Saturday. It's all so damned nebulous.” He thought for a moment. “Oh, and there was this business of
Black Widow.”

“Er—Lady Fairleigh?” hazarded Mr. Simmington vaguely.

“No. A book called
Black Widow.”
Getting no response but a polite expression of interest, mere bank manager's courtesy, he went on: “It was left to Lady Fairleigh in the will. I gather there is a book for posthumous publication, and I wondered—this is probably quite irrelevant to the case—whether this could be it.”

“You could well be right. No doubt it is. Miss Cozzens would be the one to ask. I've never been told the title.”

“Miss Cozzens says it was written before her time as secretary. She also says you probably have the manuscript here at Macpherson's.”

“No, no—I'm certain we don't have the manuscript.” By
now the attitude of polite interest was being replaced by a very definite expression of alarm. “You mean it's not at Wycherley Court? But this could be very serious. I can't tell you how annoyed Sir Edwin would be. He's—well, that's neither here nor there. But an Oliver Fairleigh book represents a very considerable amount of money to us. And the posthumous one—well, we were talking about it just before you came, as a matter of fact. It would naturally do even better than usual, and in view of the murder investigation—I don't have to spell that out for you, I'm sure, Inspector. Have you searched for it at Wycherley?”

“Miss Cozzens assures me it's not in her office, with all the proof copies and carbons. She suggested the study, and I went through it pretty thoroughly last evening. There's the rest of the house: I can put my men on to taking it apart.”

“Did you say it was written before Miss Cozzens's time? Yes, that would be right, I suppose. I heard about it when I joined the firm, which is more than seven years ago now. Things would have been different if Miss Cozzens had been responsible for the manuscript. I have the highest respect for her: her work is an editor's delight.”

“Did you know his previous secretary?”

“No, I've only been in charge of the Golden Dagger books for four years. My predecessor died—suicide, melancholia, between ourselves. But it's very likely there's someone here who would remember the name. Would you like me to ask around? And we could go through our files.”

“If you would. Of course, they will remember at Wycherley Court, but for the moment I prefer to have no one on their guard.”

“I see,” said Gerald Simmington. “The question is, if he had
one
and not a succession. As you will have realized, it's not everyone could get along with Oliver Fairleigh.”

“No, indeed,” said Meredith, getting up and looking round for his mac. “How did you manage?”

“I agreed with him all the time,” said Gerald Simmington, without a trace of a smile. “And I made myself very inconspicuous, hardly worth noticing as a target.”

Meredith found it easy to believe. Mr. Simmington seemed effortlessly to merge in with the wallpaper of his office (postwar austerity vintage). When he had led him through the labyrinth of dark corridors, shown him the main door, and shaken hands with him, Meredith looked at his retreating back, and found it difficult to remember what his face looked like.

At the street door he looked out on the June drizzle, and drew on his raincoat. He was not used to London. He realized he was not sure of his way back to the tube, and fished into his pocket for a street map, an aggravating aid that always got itself folded up in impossible ways. As he did so, the dragon-faced secretary from the outer office came out in a drab gray street coat, and Meredith asked her instead.

“Grreen Parrk,” she said, Edinburgh in her accent and her stance. “I'll put you on your way.”

They walked down the dreadfully genteel little side street.

“It must be an interesting job you have, there,” hazarded Meredith.

“Very interesting,” she said, with an upward intonation. “Especially the religious side.”

“Sir Edwin seemed an exceptionally easy person to work for,” went on Meredith. “Very good-humored.”

“Aye, he is,” volunteered the lady, looking ahead as if she disapproved of the question. “Sir Edwin is a very pleasant man indeed. Your way lies there.” And nodding briskly, she took herself off in the other direction.

Chief Inspector Meredith's opinion of public boffins was that they were very clever indeed, but that criminals tended to be cleverer. The boffins' methods sometimes seemed to border on the miraculous, and some of them clearly regarded themselves as the Cagliostros of our day, and yet the rate of crimes successfully solved by the police had not risen. This rather suggested that lots of people were one or two steps ahead of them.

By rights somebody's clothes should surely have contained traces of nicotine, if (for example) it had been carried in a vial and added to Sir Oliver's birthday lakka. But nobody's did. Meredith found that very interesting indeed, and a possible extension of the boffins' field of endeavor suggested itself to him. The trouble was that their efforts were inevitably attended with a good deal of fuss: things had to be collected to be analyzed, people were inevitably put on their guard. For the moment, he decided to keep the investigation as low-key as possible: perhaps he might even be able to impress on the boffins (no, that was impossible, but to show them) how much could be achieved by the old-fashioned methods of footslogging, questioning, and checking. He thanked his Methodist Lord, however, that his rank put him beyond having to do any of this donkey work himself.

“How are things in the house here?” he asked Sergeant Trapp, when he arrived back at Wycherley Court from London at lunchtime on Monday. “Still one big happy family?”

“They're glowering,” said Sergeant Trapp, who had the longest ears in the business, and an insatiable relish for information
gained by eavesdropping. “One big long sulk, because Mark is very obviously in control. They're not taking it well at all. Could work to our advantage in the long run, I suppose.”

“It could indeed. I propose, therefore, to leave them a little longer. You never know what tempests might brew up, and I suspect with Master Terence and Miss Bella in an acute state of disappointed expectations something or other is bound to. I think the time has come to look up the Woodstocks.”

“Fine old family,” murmured Sergeant Trapp, almost automatically, with an implied touch of the forelock.

“I've seen the boy around,” said Meredith iconoclastically. “It looks as though the rot has set in.”

“He's got the family height, though,” said Trapp loyally. “I remember his father, years ago it was, at the hunt meets and suchlike. He was a fine figure on a horse.”

“Do you think the Woodstocks resented the Fairleigh-Stubbses when they bought this place?”

“As interlopers? Could be, I suppose.” Trapp scratched his head. “As far as I remember, they weren't in much of a position to resent them. By then they'd next to nothing themselves. And nobody could have resented Lady Fairleigh. She's their class, after all, or better.”

“Whereas Oliver Fairleigh—?”

“Oh, he was in a class by himself,” said Trapp.

“Well, well,” said Meredith, tearing himself away from the delusive intricacies of the English class system in decay, “I've a job for your lot. I want this house taken apart, in the gentlest possible way. I want to be sure this manuscript isn't here.”

“Black Widow
?” Sergeant Trapp's eyebrows rose. “Do you think it's worth the trouble?”

“How should I know till I find it? It may be. I'm sure it's worthwhile to keep a lot of people busy here. I'm pretty sure something nasty is going to blow up in the family. They might overhear it, and they might even be able to prevent something really nasty happening—something that would do none of our reputations any good.”

“So they're to search the house, and keep their ears open while they're about it, sir?”

“That's about it. Meanwhile I'm asking HQ for more men—ten more.”

“Whew. You'll be lucky. What for?”

“Oh, they'll give me them. If only because of all the stink this case is making.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the front gate. “Have you seen that lot out there? Journalistic cannibals, hungry for a bit of gristly flesh to be thrown in their direction. Until this case is solved, they'll be on our backs, and HQ will give us anything we ask for.”

He strode off to the study, having failed signally to answer the second part of Sergeant Trapp's question. However, when the same question was put to him by the chief commissioner over the phone a couple of minutes later, he replied readily enough.

“I want a complete check on Mark Fairleigh-Stubbs's movements over the week before his father's death. Where he was, when, how long he stayed, who he talked to, who else was in the bar—when it's a question of bars, which I think it very largely will be. I want saturation coverage, every possible scrap of information they can give me.”

Having received assent, however grudging, and given all the necessary orders, Meredith strolled out of the house. The midday sun, in contrast to the drizzle of London, beat down on the official dark blue metal of a police car on the tired lawns of Wycherley Court, and on the reporters at the gate, now swelled to a sweaty, gibbering crowd, looking and sounding like a cageful of monkeys performing frenetically for a solitary visitor. The thought of driving through that crowd was distasteful, as was the thought of them following him all the way to the Woodstock cottage and infesting the ground around it. A movement under a tree in the middle distance caught his eye. He made out, in large floppy hat and heavy shoes, Lady Fairleigh, indulging in what must have been a long-standing panacea for domestic turmoil, gardening. He walked over toward her in as casual a way as possible.

“I wonder, is there any way of getting to the Woodstocks' cottage without going through the main gate, Lady Fairleigh?” She looked startled, and he explained: “I wanted to avoid those vampires over there.”

Her brow lost any sign of trepidation. “Well, there is, of course,” she said, “but it would mean a hike of twenty minutes or so.”

“Just what I need.”

“Then I'll show you the way.” They went together round to the back of the manor house. Meredith noticed what a strong, capable woman she looked, and how sturdily she walked. The nervous, fragile surface was no doubt a consequence of thirty years of marriage to Oliver Fairleigh, but the toughness that enabled her to stick it out was very visible under the surface. “Tell me, Lady Fairleigh”—again, that look!—“was there something odd about your husband's title?” The handsome, beaky face cleared again, and she looked at him almost roguishly.

“Well, not odd, exactly. A bit absurd, perhaps.”

“I'd always imagined he'd been knighted for his services to literature, or something.”

“Oh, dear, no. His books weren't good enough for that, surely? Though perhaps they ought to have given him something nice for staying in England and paying his taxes, and not nipping off to the Channel Islands or the Algarve as most of them do. No—the title is a baronetcy, and he inherited it in 1946.”

“Yes, I saw that in
The Times.
But why absurd?”

“Well, you know, his father bought it. Paid a mint of money for it, I believe, just before the fall of Lloyd George. The business wasn't going too well, and I think he thought the title would help—would give people confidence, and so on. But of course it didn't help at all. The world is full of bankrupt baronets.”

“I see. I suppose Sir Oliver preferred not to have this known?”

“Well, he preferred people not to talk about it. What was absurd, really, was that he valued the title so highly, when he and everyone knew how it had been obtained.”

“Did the older families in the district”—they rounded a corner and made toward an overgrown corner of the estate—“did the Woodstocks, for example, rather resent your husband—an interloper, so to speak?”