Death of a Mystery Writer (21 page)

Meredith's quick, sparkling eye caught their reactions: surprise from Lady Fairleigh, more obvious puzzlement—a creasing of the brow—from her two eldest children, and from Terence, something more positive—alarm, or active dislike, or what?

“Goodness me,” said Eleanor Fairleigh. “That's a figure from the past. Miss Thorrington—you remember, children?”

Terence grunted and looked down at his plate. Mark and Bella nodded neutrally.

“Could you tell me a bit more about her?” asked Meredith, helping himself to another sandwich and cozifying the atmosphere again.

“Well, let me see: her name was Victoria. I remember that, because she told me she was born on the day the old queen died—that's exactly how she put it: ‘the old queen.' But we always called her ‘Miss Thorrington,' because it's difficult to keep calling people Victoria the whole time, and any abbreviation sounded like lèse-majesté. She was with us—what?—nine or ten years I should think.”

“And then?”

“Well, she retired. She was about seventy, you see. She went to live somewhere on the south coast—Hastings, or Bournemouth, or Southsea, or somewhere: flats for elderly gentlefolk—you know the kind of thing.”

“You haven't the address?”

“I'm sorry, I haven't. I
had,
because I sent her a card the first Christmas after she left. But there was none back, and I didn't
want to embarrass her by going on sending: I thought probably she couldn't afford cards. So we've completely lost touch.”

“Was there any kind of row when she left here?”

Meredith noted that Lady Fairleigh looked troubled, and smoothed her hair distractedly. “Oh, dear—I expect so. There usually was, you know, with . . . with things as they were. I seem to remember she left rather suddenly, before we were expecting it. But what the trouble was I can't remember—if I ever knew. Sometimes I tried
not
to know, you understand, Inspector. Do you remember, children?”

She glanced round at her brood. They all shook their heads.

“Search me,” said Terence. “I think I was at school.”

“It was some row with Father, I think,” said Mark. “She went more or less overnight. I don't think we ever knew why.”

“Well, anyway, what you've told me should be helpful,” said Meredith, putting his plate down on a side table and standing up. “If she's alive I should be able to contact her.”

“I really don't see,” said Eleanor Fairleigh, almost to herself, “what she could possibly have to do with it.”

“I'm assuming,” said Meredith, looking at them in his sly way as he gathered his things together, “that as the person who typed it, she's one of the few people who knows what's in
Black Widow.”

He studied their reactions closely. They all looked at him as if he were completely off his head.

Meredith stood by the desk in the study where Oliver Fairleigh, only a few days before, had opened his last birthday presents. He was shuffling together a sheaf of reports on the activities of Mark Fairleigh in the week his father died. They represented a fortune in shoe leather, and would make interesting reading for the car trip. Meredith looked around the study, possibly, he hoped, for the last time: it was not a particularly attractive room, but it was what its owner wanted it to be: dark, substantial, smelling of wealth and social position.

He had made a discovery about the study. One of the bookcases, at the far end by the window, was not a bookcase at all, but a painted wall. He had had excited thoughts about secret passages, but it was no more than another elaborate Oliver Fairleigh joke: with Victorian meticulousness, shelves and books had been painted on the wall, making a perfect trompe l'oeil. The books had been lettered in gold and given titles expressive of Oliver Fairleigh's opinions and sense of humor. They had probably, Meredith guessed, been changed here and there over the years, for the political references ranged from a heavy black book entitled
Merrie England
by Sir Stafford Cripps to a very slim volume (so slim as to be almost invisible) which was entitled
Principle in Politics
and was attributed to Harold Wilson. Elsewhere on the “shelves” there were
The Mitford Family on Each Other
(twenty-five volumes), and a series of imaginary novels with dreadful punning titles:
From Here to Maternity, By Love Depressed,
and, obscurely,
The English Lieutenant's Woman.
The bookcase seemed to Meredith somehow an image of Sir Oliver
Fairleigh-Stubbs: ponderous, outwardly impressive, actually fake, lightweight. He remembered a description of him by a police colleague who had met him in life: “a bookie who had wangled an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party.”

He had made another discovery in the study, and before he went out into the early sunshine he could not resist the impulse to go back to it once more: it was an elderly Dictaphone, stowed away in a cupboard, but reproducing at the flick of a switch with eerie verisimilitude the voice of Oliver Fairleigh a few days before his death—nut-brown, resonant, baritonal, a voice rich in good living and self-satisfaction: the authentic Fairleigh sound.

“‘Flanked in the doorway by two sturdy policemen, the Honorable Jane Buchanan, flushed with shame or fury, turned on her father. “I did it for love of you,” she shouted. As she walked through the door and out to the waiting sunlight, her head held high, Lord Fernihill, standing by the superb Adam fireplace, let his head fall on his chest and wept bitterly.' Do you find that rather melodramatic, Miss Cozzens?”

The reply was indistinguishable.

“No, of course you wouldn't be. And I imagine strong emotion isn't exactly your cup of tea, is it? It embarrasses you, I would imagine. Do you write novels yourself, I wonder, Miss Cozzens, in the secrecy of your boudoir?”

Again a mumbled reply.

“I suspect, you know, they must be very strong-minded novels. Something of the Ivy Compton-Burnett type, I would fancy. A touch of the Doris Lessing. God, how I hate brainy women. Where were we? ‘And as Inspector Powys drove back along the stately drive to Everton Lodge . . .'”

Inspector Meredith (not greatly caring for the doings of Inspector Powys) clicked the machine off. Another image of Oliver Fairleigh had surfaced in his mind: talented, perverse, intolerable—Oliver Fairleigh living up to his public image. Was such a man killed merely for his money? A man who had scattered in his wake so many hand grenades—was none of them lobbed back at his feet?

Inspector Meredith finally closed the study door, and walked slowly out to the stately drive of Wycherley Court. The morning was still very young, and only a few greenhorn reporters—those unafflicted by fuggy hangovers or dyspepsia—were already in position at the gate. They were being rewarded by a sight of Bella Fairleigh, wafting past a laburnum tree and along the side of a superb rose garden. She seemed to have regained every degree of her once habitual cool: with a crisp white coif over her hair, russet blouse, and cream skirt nearly to her ankles, she made, in soft focus, the sort of picture Anthony Armstrong-Jones used to take of royalty. With his heart pausing a second in appreciation, Meredith stood by the police car. By what quirk of genetics had Oliver Fairleigh been able to produce anything as gorgeous as this?

Bella continued, apparently oblivious of the photographers, apparently oblivious of everything around her. But Meredith noted that she was changing her direction, and was willing to bet she would come over to him. Without displaying any obvious signs of registering who he was or why he was there, she did so. Close up, she was very, very beautiful, and as her piquant, pixie face turned up into his, its eyebrows arched in query, Meredith's Welsh heart beat very fast indeed.

“Are you finished with us?” she asked.

“Nearly,” said Meredith. And added: “Perhaps.”

“You've hardly spoken to me,” said Bella, stating it as a fact, not a complaint. “Or Terry.”

“No, I haven't. Beyond getting your account of the positions in the study at the time, and your broad agreement with Mr. Woodstock's picture, I haven't felt I needed to. Was I wrong? Is there anything you would like to tell me?”

Bella considered. “No,” she said. She tilted her head to one side and looked him in the eye. Meredith decided this must be one of her techniques. The effect was formidable. “I just thought,” she said eventually, with a little pout, “that you must have got the idea that I was only interested in Daddy's money.”

“Does it matter to you what I think?”

“Not at all!” She turned away, dissatisfied. But it seemed to matter. Gazing at the ground, she said: “I loved him. I wanted his money, and I loved him.”

Meredith said: “Unless it's relevant to the murder, it's no business of mine. It's your brother you have to make your peace with, not us.”

“Oh, Mark! He's contemptible.”

“Has he ever done anything to harm you or Terence?”

“Mark has never done anything positive whatsoever in his life.”

“Except in these last few days, perhaps,” amended Meredith. Bella looked furious. “On the other hand, you haven't been so guiltless where he is concerned, I would guess.”

“Oh? What do you think I've done to him?”

“Made sure that a good supply of stories about him reached his father.”

A not very pleasant smile crossed Bella's face. She shrugged. “That's the name of the game.”

“There's something else I think you've done that you're not too proud of, or shouldn't be,” Meredith went on, feeling rather nonconformist. Bella raised her wonderful eyebrows and opened her eyes wide. “I think you had an agreement with your father. About the Woodstocks.”

“They're contemptible.”

“How pleasant to have so many people beneath your contempt. Are you going to tell me about the agreement? No? Well, I guess that to get your father to be pleasant the whole evening, you volunteered to provide entertainment for him. Am I right?”

“Yes. Why not? We often had little pacts like that. They kept him interested. Poor Daddy was desperately bored.”

“And what exactly did the pact consist of?”

“Why should I tell you?” Bella began to drift off into the garden, but changed her mind and turned back. Meredith guessed that she was at all times desperate to be the center of attention, and had missed just that sensation since her father died. “I promised I'd do my best to reduce Ben to a condition of hopeless
passion in the course of the evening, and drive that mousy little wife of his emerald with jealousy.”

“What made you think you could?”

“I can,”
said Bella, formidably, as if her father spoke through her. Then she added: “I'd met Ben in London a few months ago. It was just before his wedding, and he was up arranging financial matters. I had the impression the family did some fiddling over death duties, and had more stashed away somewhere than people usually give them credit for. Anyway, he came panting after me like a bedraggled spaniel. It was quite sweet, really. Actually I had other fish to fry at the time, but when Daddy told me he'd savaged him the weekend before I thought I'd try and save him from a second attack. So that's all it was. I was going to give him a nice romantic evening—”

“While your father—let me guess—was going to pump little Mrs. Woodstock about the family fortunes.” Bella hesitated a moment, then nodded. “And what was supposed to come out of this little campaign?”

Bella shrugged. “Nothing. What could? I wasn't going to drag Ben up to my bed before his wife's outraged eyes. Father wasn't going to blackmail the Woodstocks out of their few remaining thousands. It was just something to amuse Father. It was just a game.”

“You both like dangerous games.”

“What other kind is there worth playing?”

And this time Bella really did drift away, studiedly unconscious of the clicks of cameras at the gate, the morning sun playing on her auburn hair. Meredith dived into the car, punched the back of his driver to waken him from openmouthed contemplation of the Madison Avenue vision wafting across the lawns, and let himself be driven at top speed through the gates. For once not a camera turned in his direction, and he was grateful.

Safely away from Wycherley, with an hour and a half's drive ahead, Meredith settled himself down in his seat, and began shuffling through the voluminous reports from the men on the beat of the activities of Mark Fairleigh in the week before his father's
death. It was, as he had expected, a sort of Drunk's Progress. The beginning and end of these seven days had been within a radius of thirty miles of Wycherley Court, the weekdays in and around London (where he periodically attended some kind of office, or saw people about some kind of orders). But whether in the town or the country, the lunchtimes and evenings were a succession of pubs and clubs, often following in a descending curve of respectability as the night wore on. How Mark managed it financially he did not know, but it seemed clear from the reports that fairly little could send him into an agreeable haze, and then the main thing was to keep there. He was better when he had company: when he was alone he tended to drink himself into oblivion or bellicosity.

His progress from place to place in his alcoholic pilgrimage was a vivid commentary on the effectiveness of the Breathalyzer laws. He invariably drove himself.

The people he met were interesting: they ranged from men and boys like himself—the outcast type, black sheep, shady characters living from one shift to the next and always wanting credit on an expected loan—to petty crooks, con men, gentlemen with a minor racket, people with ways of keeping just within the law, or with manners that appealed to old ladies. In the rich tapestry of the criminal classes, Mark seemed to have stuck to the seedy fringes. Meredith felt he could pick out without too much trouble one of the occasions when Mark was solicited to come in on the drug racket. There was documented a long, agonizing, and finally acrimonious conversation in the Walthamstow Three Pigeons late on Friday evening with a man in his mid-twenties—a man with a gaunt, hawkish face, sunken eyes, and hook nose. The description exactly corresponded with the bass guitarist of the Witchetty Grub, whose picture on the wall of Terence's room Meredith had slipped in to check up on the day before. He had disliked the face at the time. He had also noted with interest the empty bottles scattered around the room, and the general smell of frowstiness and disappointed hopes.