Death of a Mystery Writer (2 page)

“You've got no hollyhocks!” he bellowed to the young couple in the doorway.

“I beg your pardon . . . !”

“You've got no hollyhocks,” he repeated, at twice the volume. “Cottages like this have to have hollyhocks.” He gave his arm to his wife and stumped into the house—past his hosts and straight into the living room.

“Eleanor!” said a washed-out-looking lady by the fireplace, coming forward to kiss her. “So good of you to come. And Oliver! How well you're looking.”

Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs surveyed the elder Mrs. Woodstock. Her gentility, like the colors of her woollens, seemed not to have been fast, and to have come out in the wash. “I have got gout, impetigo, and athlete's foot,” he announced, “but no doubt to
the casual observer I look well.” He sank into the best armchair and looked ahead, as if contemplating mankind's extinction with gloomy relish.

“Harold Drayton you've met,” said Mrs. Woodstock vaguely. Oliver Fairleigh grunted. Harold Drayton was a walking gentleman, a tame nobody who could be counted on to make up a lunch party, one who valued a reasonable meal more than he disliked the company of Oliver Fairleigh (there were few such). He was worth, in the estimation of the guest of honor, no more than a faint grunt.

By this time the host and hostess were back in the room, having been exchanging glances in the tiny kitchen. Benjamin Woodstock was tall and willowy in the Rupert Brooke manner, though without the good looks. In fact, like his mother, he looked indefinably mangy. Celia, his wife, was, at that moment, looking frankly terrified.

However, with the offer of sherry, Oliver Fairleigh's mood changed. He sat back in his chair, beaming in his porcine way at all and sundry, and responding to conversational advances. His voice, something between a public-school sports master's and a sergeant major's, was not adapted to polite conversation, but nevertheless everyone in the room began to relax a little—except Eleanor, his wife, who knew him too well.

“They tell me you write, eh?” boomed Sir Oliver, baring his teeth at Ben Woodstock.

“Well, yes, just a little,” said Ben. Then, thinking this did not sound too good in view of his purpose in inviting the great Oliver Fairleigh, he added: “But I'm hoping to make a living out of it.”

Oliver Fairleigh left, for him, quite a short pause.

“Oh, yes? What at? Eh?”

“Well, I've just had a detective story accepted.”

Oliver Fairleigh snorted. “Detective stories? No money in them. You'll starve in six months. Write a thriller.”

“Oh, do you think so?”

“Write a thriller. One of those documentaries. Somebody trying to shoot the pope—that kind of nonsense. Fill it full of technical details. Those are the things people buy these days.”

“I'm not sure about the technical details—I don't think I'd be too good on them.”

“Make 'em up, dear boy, make 'em up. Only one in a hundred knows any better, and he won't bother to write and correct you. You'll never get anywhere if you overestimate your public.”

“Trying to shoot the pope. That does sound a good idea,” said the elder Mrs. Woodstock meditatively. Oliver Fairleigh turned to her urbanely.

“Ah—you feel strongly about birth control, I suppose?” He looked at her in a frankly appraising way, and then laughed.

This comparatively bright mood lasted Sir Oliver just into lunch, as his wife knew it would. Such a mood was never to be trusted, and was the prelude to (and was intended to contrast with) some other mood or series of moods which would be launched on his companions' lulled sensibilities.

The fish was a very uninteresting little bit of plaice, hardly able to support the circlet of lemon on top. Everyone went at it as if fish were a duty which there was no point in trying to make into a pleasure. Not so Oliver Fairleigh. He gazed at it with a beam of anticipation, then set about masticating it with an elaborate pantomime of savoring every succulent mouthful. He devoted himself to the miserable triangle of nutriment with all the zest due to a classic French dish. Periodically he wiped his mouth and beamed with simulated enthusiasm round the table, as if to ensure that the other guests were properly appreciating the gastronomic distinction of it. They looked at him in dubious acknowledgment of his sunny temper. His wife looked at her plate.

Over the crumbed cutlet that followed a new performance was enacted. Oliver Fairleigh sank into a mood of intense depression: he gazed at the cutlet as if it were a drowned friend whose remains he was trying to identify at a police morgue. He picked up a forkful of mashed potato, inspected it, smelled it, and
finally, with ludicrously overdone reluctance, let it drop into his mouth, where he chewed it for fully three minutes before swallowing. Conversation flagged.

It was the wine Ben Woodstock was worried about. Oliver Fairleigh was acknowledged a connoisseur of wine: every other book he wrote was studded with some item of wine lore or some devastating judgment designed to wither the ignorant. He was consulted by experts, and had been quoted by Cyril Ray. As he took up his glass, Ben's heart sank. It wouldn't be right. In spite of all the advice he'd had, all the money he'd spent, it wouldn't be right.

Sir Oliver looked, frowned, sipped, frowned, set down his glass, and stared ahead of him in gloomy silence. Once or twice he made as if to say something to his host (sitting beside him, and looking more meager than ever) but each time he stopped himself, as if he had had second thoughts. Finally he took up his glass and downed the contents in one go.

Over the pudding—something spongy, which had gone soggy—Ben Woodstock felt the weight of the silence had become too heavy to bear, and began once again to make conversation with his guest of honor.

“I suppose you find it's very important to establish some kind of routine when you're writing, don't you, sir?”

“Eh? What? What do I find important?”

“Routine.”

“Who says I find routine important?”

“I said I
suppose
you find routine important in writing.”

“Oh. You suppose, do you? Hmm.”

The silence continued until the pudding had been eaten, when Ben tried again.

“I was wondering if you could give me any advice—”

“Eh?”

“I was wondering if you could give me any advice—”

“Sack your cook,” said Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs in a voice of thunder that silenced all the lesser voices around the table. “Best piece of advice I can give you.”

Celia Woodstock got up and darted toward the kitchen in the fearsome silence that followed. Then they all adjourned for coffee. Having made a scene, Oliver Fairleigh was for the moment peaceful. Ben Woodstock noticed the change of mood, and knowing the reputation for brevity of his guest's good tempers, he felt he had to take advantage of it. Greatly daring, in view of the quality of the coffee, he approached the subject which the meal had been intended to lead up to.

“I was wondering about publishers, sir—”

Oliver Fairleigh fixed him with a stare. “Thought you'd got a book accepted,” he said.

“Well yes, I have, actually. By Robinson and Heath.” The firm in question was tiny, and of no repute. Oliver Fairleigh grunted. “Of course I'm terribly grateful to them, taking a chance on an unknown author, and all that, but naturally I'm thinking a little of the future too. I know you're a Macpherson's author yourself, and I was wondering—”

“Quite exceptionally good firm, Robinson and Heath,” interrupted Oliver Fairleigh with unusual energy. “You're in really good hands there. Nothing like these small firms for taking care of you. Keep out of the hands of the big boys. Never know where you are with all these amalgamations. Next thing you know you're being paid in dollars or Saudi Arabian yashmaks or God knows what. No, stick to Robinson and Heath, my boy. You're in real luck if you're in with them.”

He rose, panting and snorting, to his feet. “Come, Eleanor, we must be off.” He made for the door, and accepted gracefully the ritual gestures made to a departing guest. “So nice to have a meal with old friends,” he boomed. “Good-bye, Mr.—er—er—” and he gazed at Harold Drayton for a moment, as though trying to think of a reason for his existence, bared his teeth at the elder Mrs. Woodstock, and then sailed out through the door. As he shook hands with his young host and hostess he grunted his thanks, and then fixed the luckless Ben with an eye of outrage.

“One thing I wanted to say, my boy,” he said in his voice of thunder. “That wine, that wine you served. It was . . .” the
pause ran on, and on, and Ben Woodstock remained transfixed by that terrible eye, unable to stir a muscle “... very good,” concluded Oliver Fairleigh. “Quite exceptionally fine. Come to dinner with me next Saturday, eh? You and your wife? We'll expect you.”

And he turned and made off to his car.

As they drove home, Sir Oliver folded his hands once more over his ballooning stomach, shook now and then in delighted self-appreciation, and stole glances at his wife out of the corner of his eye.

“I'm glad I told that lie about the appalling wine,” he said finally. “It does one good, once in a while, to make simple people happy.”

Monday

Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs sat in his study, glaring resentfully at a glass of water on the table by his side. At his feet sat his boxer dog, Cuff, grunting periodically. In this and in other respects Cuff resembled his master, and had in fact been acquired with a view to his providing a canine variation on the Oliver Fairleigh theme. So he grunted, snuffled, snapped periodically at inoffensive callers, and generally gave people to comment on the well-known idea that dogs grow like their owners. Which was unfair, for taken by and large Cuff was a harmless animal.

Oliver Fairleigh was dictating, in his overloud voice, the last chapter of his latest detective story. It was one of his Inspector Powys ones, and it had to be with his publishers before the week was out, if they were to make the Christmas market.

“‘The thing that nobody has remarked,' said Inspector Powys, wagging an admonitory finger at his fascinated audience, ‘is the curious position of the body. Now, Mrs. Edwards was cutting bread, look you—'” Oliver Fairleigh paused. “Have we had a ‘look you' in the last three pages, Miss Cozzens?”

Barbara Cozzens (whose efficiency was such that she could take perfect shorthand while her thoughts were miles away) flicked irritatedly through her notebook. “I don't think so, Sir Oliver.”

“People get annoyed if there are too many and annoyed if there are none at all,” said Oliver Fairleigh testily. “Personally I've no idea whether the Welsh say it or not. Do they, Miss Cozzens?”

“All the Welsh people I know are very Anglicized,” said Barbara Cozzens distantly, adding rather acidly: “It's a bit late in the day to start worrying about that.”

“True, true. I'm stuck with it now, just as I'm stuck with the oversexed little Welsh idiot who says it. Where were we? ‘Mrs. Edwards was cutting bread, look you, to take upstairs for the family tea. Now to cut bread—you perhaps would not be aware of this, Lord Fernihill, but I assure you it is so—the body must lean
forward.
Many a time I've watched my old mother doing it, God rest her soul. Now Mrs. Edwards was a heavy woman, and she was stabbed from behind—and yet she fell
backward.
Now . . .'”

For the next hour Miss Cozzens let her thoughts wander. When she had first come to work for Oliver Fairleigh she had followed his works with interest, had been eager to hear the solution, and had once pointed out a flaw in Inspector Powys's logic. But only once. Sir Oliver had fixed her with his gob-stopper eye and said: “Any fool could see that. But my readers won't.” And he had gone on dictating, unperturbed. That was a long time ago. Then Miss Cozzens had often read detective stories for pleasure; now she shied away from them at station bookstalls, and hated the sound of the name Powys. She sat there, upright, her hand making dancing patterns over the paper, her mind full of Amalfi last summer, the widower who had made advances to her there, and the sensitive novel she was writing about the episode—a fragile, delicate story, gossamer light, every adjective chosen with loving care and
Roget's Thesaurus.

“‘And as Inspector Powys drove back along the stately drive to Everton Lodge, he shook his head at the pity of it, and smiled his sad, compassionate smile. THE END.' That's it. Thank God I've done with that Welsh twit for another year or two. Next time it will be a Mrs. Merrydale murder. Or I'll just have a common or garden policeman. A drink, I think, Miss Cozzens.”

“The doctor—”

“Damn the doctor,” roared Sir Oliver, kicking Cuff to make him growl in sympathy. “I don't take orders from any quack. I don't get shot of Inspector Powys every day of the week. Now, unlock the bottom drawer, there's a good girl, and we'll both have a glass of sherry. You know where the glasses are.”

With a sigh Miss Cozzens complied. If Sir Oliver was going to start this sort of thing regularly, he'd be well on the way to killing himself. At least nobody could say she hadn't warned him. She found the concealed bottle, got two glasses from the cupboard, and poured two not-quite-full glasses.

“Full!” roared Oliver Fairleigh, like a baby in a paddy. Cuff got laboriously to his feet and growled at her in an ugly manner. Miss Cozzens, with another sigh, filled her employer's glass, and—after a moment's thought—her own too. Then all three of them settled down to a rather frosty celebration.

“Did you enjoy the book, Miss Cozzens?” inquired Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs, after his first sip.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The book, Miss Cozzens. The masterwork that we have been working on together.”

“I'm afraid I haven't been paying much attention, Sir Oliver. I'm sure it will do very well.”