Death of a Mystery Writer (19 page)

“And—?” asked Bella, struggling to regain her usual pose of utter coolness.

“And—you come to various conclusions about what's been going on while you've been stuck out there on your little alcoholic cloud. Just to take a little example: I realize that you've been using Surtees—the faithful servant, Crichton
de nos jours
—to go along to Father with every little bit of gossip and dirt he can pick up about me. I suspect, by the way, that you needn't have bothered, because I guess Father paid him for doing exactly the same service. But anyway, you have paid him by sleeping with him, without any particular reluctance, I should guess.”

“Evidence?” spat out Bella.

“None, sister dear. I'm not a policeman. I don't need to have everything cast-iron. The odd bit of gossip in a pub; your name and a snigger—because Surtees talks in his cups too, I suspect. Then the fact that he very much wants to stay on, and I can't quite believe it's out of loyalty to me or the ancestral name. These things are nothing—hardly even straws in the wind. But they convince me, and really, I'm afraid, that's all that matters.”

“You're despicable, Mark,” said Bella, leaning back in her chair and lighting up a cigarette, and seeming in an odd way relieved. “You're clutching on to fantastic excuses, so as not to do anything for us, and that's all there is to it.”

“Quite,” said Mark. “I knew you'd say that. And that's what you can tell everybody, too, when you spread your hard-luck story. I've cultivated a very thick skin about what people say about me over the last few years, and I think it's going to stand me in very good stead.”

He poured himself a large cup of coffee from the new pot. He had relaxed since the moment of intensity earlier, but he gave the impression of being a man preparing himself for another spring.

“Actually,” he said casually, “as far as you're concerned, Bella, I'm willing to be charitable.” Involuntarily she turned toward him. “I'm willing to assume that you knew nothing of Brother Terence's plan.”

“Ah,” said Terence, with a Mick Jagger sneer, but his voice not quite steady, “what are we going to bring up from the lucky dip this time? More hazy fantasies from the seven years' blind?”

“Quite recent ones, these,” said Mark. “I think you've only recently started thinking about money and inheritances and the like. But when you start, you work quickly, don't you, Terry? It's convenient not to have any awkward, old-fashioned things like scruples or compunctions, isn't it? It enables you to go straight to the guts of the matter, doesn't it, and really get down to the job.”

“Taking up evangelical religion, Mark?” asked Terence coolly. “Come on, skip the New Testament asides. What have you dredged up out of your dreamworld for me?”

Again Mark leaned forward. “I think that you never really
knew what Father was likely to do with his money, never having in your life thought about anyone but yourself for more than half a second at a time. But you had this nagging suspicion at the back of your mind that
perhaps
Father wouldn't want to cut me off, that
perhaps
he'd want the money and the title to go together.”

“So?”

“So you thought: if he
is
in the will after all these years and everything he's done, then it's going to need something really serious to get him out. There's been debts, and drunkenness, and rudeness, so what does it take? And you thought that something not just on the windy side of the law, but something really criminal, with a big scandal and prison at the end of it, might do the trick.”

“I see,” said Terence, looking straight back into his brother's brown eyes. “And what did I plan to do: leave you in the vaults of the Bank of England while you were dead drunk?”

“It's odd, but in the past month I've had three offers to go into the drug trade. Odd coincidence, isn't it? Tempting offers, they were. I was to be a middleman, a distributor. They knew—whoever ‘they' were, Terence—that I went around the country, and that no one would be surprised if I turned up in this pub or that one. They made it sound very simple and nice: it was just a question of arranging meetings with people, passing the stuff over in lavatories, and so on. Nothing dirty about the trade at all, the way they told it. And it was very tempting, in view of the sums involved. It would have been so easy to say yes.”

“I'm surprised you didn't,” said Terence. “Which is a fair enough indication that it never happened.”

“Well, you don't want me to preach, so I won't tell you all the reasons why I didn't, but the fact is, there was also a bad bit of carelessness on your part, little brother. One of the men who made me an offer seemed just a bit familiar. I couldn't put a name to him, but I knew I'd seen him somewhere. I went into your bedroom the other day, and looked at that poster of your group. He's your bass guitarist. Some bad planning on your part there, Terry.”

“It's crap,” said Terence, looking at him viciously, his red lips pursed. “You're living in a fantasy world.”

“So now you see,” said Mark, now quite relaxed and totally in command, “why I feel no obligations. If you ever get anything, either of you—and it won't be much—it will be charity, pure charity, without an ounce of moral obligation on my part. And of course there is one other thing, one other possibility. I'm trying to put that from my mind, but at the moment I'm not entirely succeeding. Do you know what would happen if I went down to the Wycherley Arms tonight for a pint?” The other two frowned, not seeing what he was driving at. “The landlord would serve me quickly, and make sure he had business in the other bar. And everyone would edge away and drink up in a hurry. And all because last Saturday I said my father ought to be shot, and a week later he was dead.”

Mark put his napkin aside and pushed his chair back. The others watched him, resentment written across their faces like a neon sign.

“Of course, people jump to conclusions,” he went on. “But the possibility remains that someone heard about what I'd said, and tried to make a very nasty use of it. It was a very fair bet that the police would jump to the conclusion that I'd threatened my father, and then done what I threatened. It was a nice little notion, and but for the grace of alcohol it would probably have succeeded.” He got up, and leaned on the back of his chair. “But still, it didn't succeed. And whoever had the idea has failed, and can't make it succeed now. And before long, I
shall
be able to go into the Wycherley Arms. And they'll call me ‘Sir Mark' there, and I'll buy drinks all round. And then I'll walk home to this house, and I'll go round from room to room—yours will have to be redecorated, Terry—and I'll sit down in the study, and have a cigar, and I'll say to myself: ‘This is all mine. And it came to me without my ever cringing, or flattering, or doing anybody down. I have no debts to the past.' And I shall sleep—very, very well.”

He walked out of the breakfast room, across the hall (where Sergeant Trapp was over by the front door, contemplating the
June morning), and into the drawing room, where he sat in an armchair and brooded long and gloomily over the morning papers.

At his feet, Cuff slept noisily. It was almost like the old days again, he thought.

Sergeant Trapp's narration of the conversation at the breakfast table—Meredith blessed for the thousandth time that miraculous combination of sharp ears and accurate memory—was interrupted by a call from Gerald Simmington at Macpherson's.

“No news of the missing manuscript yet?” he asked, his gray voice sounding almost urgent.

“Afraid not, sir, not yet,” said Meredith. “We've taken the whole house apart, and the only result is that we're pretty sure it's not here now. The only thing to hope for is that when the case is solved, the question of the whereabouts of
Black Widow
will become clear at the same time.”

“I fervently hope so,” said Mr. Simmington. From his tone it might have been gathered that the loss of
Black Widow
was comparable to that of Byron's memoirs or Emily Brontë's second novel, or at any rate that it would be counted so at Macpherson's. He explained. “Sir Edwin is most put out. If it has disappeared, it will represent a considerable loss to us.”

Inspector Meredith didn't quite like the word “loss” to describe something they had never had, but he merely said: “To change the subject just slightly, have you had any luck with the question of the last secretary?”

“Well, a little. Not enough, perhaps. She left about seven years ago, some months before Miss Cozzens was engaged. There may have been some temporary help in between, because Sir Oliver was careful before engaging anyone permanently. There'd been a period when he had five or six in a row, none of them staying more than a few weeks, so he had to make sure he
got someone who could stand him.” Mr. Simmington seemed to feel he had put too much emotion into the last words, and amended them to “could put up with his little ways. Anyway, the previous one left in a cloud—or at any rate, there was some kind of row. Nobody remembers what, or probably ever knew, here.”

“And nobody knows where she went?”

“Well, the general impression seems to be that she retired. She was certainly old, and people have the idea that the row, or whatever it was, only hastened things by a few months.”

“I suppose nobody remembers her name?”

Mr. Simmington's voice seemed to take on a tut-tut of disapproval at the lack of method in the ways of lesser human beings: “Everybody does, but it's not quite the same name. Unfortunately we toothcombed our files a couple of years ago, and there's no note of hers left here. There are lots of suggestions from the older members of staff, all vaguely similar. Fennington seems the most likely, Fuddleston the least. It must be something along those lines.”

“Well then, I'll have to ask the family. I've been trying so far to keep them fairly in the dark about what I'm after, but there'll have to be some kind of confrontation before very long. Tell Sir Edwin I'm keeping the manuscript very much in mind.”

“I'll do that, Inspector.” Once more Mr. Simmington's voice was that of the faithful office spaniel. “He'll be
very
glad to hear it.”

Meredith put down the phone, and turned his mind back to Sergeant Trapp's recital. Since he had been posted outside the door, he was unable to embellish the conversation with descriptions of facial expressions, but Sergeant Trapp was useful precisely for the fact that he did not go in for embellishment. He recounted, and where possible reproduced the intonation of, the conversation over breakfast, and enjoyed himself hugely. At the end of it, as Trapp drew himself up to full height in self-satisfaction, Meredith said: “Really one big happy family, aren't they? I suppose with a father like that, one couldn't hope for anything better.”

“I don't believe in blaming the parents always,” said Sergeant Trapp, who had a son in modeling.

“You believe in original sin, eh? Well, as a Welshman, I won't go against that. On the whole it's a much more simple and satisfying explanation, I grant you that.”

“Either way, they're a pretty nasty bunch. I thought it opened up all sorts of possibilities, what Sir Mark said.”

“Oh, you're right. And it closes down some as well.” Seeing Sergeant Trapp look disappointed and bewildered, Meredith went on: “When all the reports are in about Mark Fairleigh's activities over the past week, we'll do a bit of checking on that bass guitarist. Meanwhile, I think I'll take a look downstairs—in the servants' quarters, or whatever one calls them these days: ‘the domestic operatives' enclave,' I suppose.”

“I don't like the look of that Surtees,” said Trapp.

“Well, if you don't, there's probably plenty that do,” said Meredith. “Including, I'm quite sure, the man himself. I've never felt such a glow of invincible self-admiration from anyone in my life before. Keep those ears at it, my boy.”

And he trotted off, through the baize door and down the wide stone stairs to the enormous, almost luxurious kitchen: it had been extensively modernized, no doubt to keep Mrs. Moxon happy, and there was about it an air both of infinite room and of comfort. Meredith had turned up most opportunely. Mid-morning coffee was in progress, and it looked as if it was serving as a sort of servants' council. Round the table were seated Surtees, Mrs. Moxon, whom Meredith had briefly glimpsed some days before, Wiggens the gardener, and—somewhat apart, and sitting much more upright and angular—Miss Cozzens.

“Well,” said Mrs. Moxon, slapping down her cup on her saucer as she observed his approach down the stairs, “about time I'd say.” She folded her arms across her ballooning bosom and prepared to be a vital witness. Miss Cozzens, on the other hand, perhaps not quite happy at being caught fraternizing, prepared to slip away.

“Oh, before you go, Miss Cozzens—”

“Yes, Inspector?” There was reluctance in the set of her hips, in the swing of her sensible navy skirt.

“Did you check on the methods of killing Sir Oliver used in his various books, as you said you would?”

“Yes, I did. He never used nicotine poisoning at all. Of the poisonings he used arsenic twice, cyanide once, and strychnine once. Not very many, but as I said, it wasn't his favorite method of killing. There was one with arsenic in the toad-in-the-hole. It's one of the Mrs. Merrydale ones, where she uses her domestic instincts to solve the mystery. But it's not very like, is it? In fact, none of the killings was anything like Sir Oliver's death, with the poisoned drink, the toasts, and so on. I have all the various references upstairs, should you need them, Inspector.”