Death of a Mystery Writer (24 page)

“Oh, yes,” said Meredith. “Tell me more about him.”

Arriving at Macpherson's elegantly decaying Queen Anne offices at eleven o'clock, Inspector Meredith found the Scottish dragon alone in the reception room on the ground floor, and meekly sent his name up to Gerald Simmington.

“He's in conference with Sir Edwin,” said the dragon. “He would be obliged if you would wait five minutes.”

“Of course, no hurry at all,” said Meredith. Then to pass the time of day (though her expression did not encourage chat for the sake of chat) he said: “I suppose you're all busy coping with the rush on Oliver Fairleigh's works?”

“Precisely,” said the dragon, her thin lips registering no pleasure. “Last year's hardback will be top of the bestseller lists on Sunday again. Reprints ordered over the whole range of paperbacks. Talk of one of those all-star films. As if his death improved the quality of his books. I never cease to be surprised by the reading habits of people.” She threw a disapproving emphasis on the last word, as if the reading habits of dogs and cats were more rational and predictable.

“I was talking to Sir Oliver's old secretary yesterday,” said Meredith.

“Oh, yes, Miss Thorrington.”

“She confessed to enjoying Sir Oliver's books. She obviously prefers her entertainment to be frankly enjoyable—doesn't like all these forensic details one gets these days.”

The Edinburgh Terror gave him a look which said that but for Loyalty to the Firm she would have told him what she thought of Miss Thorrington's literary opinions. She turned to go back to her ancient Olivetti, but Meredith said pleasantly:

“I suppose Sir Edwin is worried about the manuscript of the posthumous book?”

“That I couldn't say,” said the dragon.

“It must represent a great deal of money to him,” said Meredith.

“Sir Edwin is a good Scot,” said the dragon. “He takes what the Lord provides.”

Meredith wondered in how active a sense one should understand the word “takes.” He scanned the bookcases in the outer office which contained the various publications of Macpherson's—religious, educational, and frankly unworthy. He was saved from having to incur the dragon's disapproval of his choice of browsing material by a call from upstairs.

“Mr. Simmington will see you now,” said the dragon, as to a tradesman. She took him into the hallway and gave him precise instructions how to find his office. As he made his way again through the labyrinth of small corridors and disconcerting steps Meredith saw the maze as an indisputably appropriate habitat for a publisher of detective stories. After various sudden blank walls and hairpin turns he came to the door marked G
ERALD
S
IMMINGTON
, knocked, and went in.

The room was as neat and characterless as ever, the desk cleared for action, or perhaps abstract speculation, only the covers of the books on the shelves giving a modicum of color. The only addition was a glass of whisky by Simmington's right hand. Meredith hadn't thought of Simmington as a mid-morning drinker, but doubtless his profession had its rigors and its longueurs. The editor of the Golden Dagger series looked as neutral and uninvolved as ever.

“I hear from your receptionist that the sales of Oliver Fairleigh are soaring,” Meredith said pleasantly.

“Incredibly,” said Gerald Simmington smoothly. “He was
always our bestseller in the fiction line. Now he's beginning to outstrip the popular religious works.”

“It will compensate Sir Edwin for the loss of
Black Widow—
if it
is
lost.”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Simmington, shaking his head skeptically. “Does that mean you've given up hope of finding it?”

“No, by no means,” said Meredith. “If I'm any judge of character it should still be in existence.”

Gerald Simmington gestured him to a low seat by the door, and then, as if saying something he knew sounded naive, asked: “And if it's found, will it solve Sir Oliver's murder?”

Meredith eased himself back in his chair. “Not perhaps in the sense you mean,” he said. “No, I'm afraid Oliver Fairleigh didn't have a literary premonition of his own end, and I don't think it was precisely used as a blueprint. The thing that's always been odd—and which everyone in one way or another has pointed to, whether charitably or otherwise—is that Oliver Fairleigh was a very slapdash writer, especially as far as plotting and scientific detail were concerned. Miss Thorrington”—he saw a flicker of recognition in Simmington's eyes—“says he was a fun writer. Miss Cozzens says she doesn't think anyone copying his methods would ever manage to kill anyone. Sir Oliver himself said, ‘Damn forensic medicine.' No—all in all, I haven't got too far with the idea that the method, in detail, was copied from the missing book. And as far as I can learn from Miss Thorrington, the actual situation was fairly remote from what actually occurred at Wycherley Court.”

“Fascinating, this,” said Mr. Simmington in his bloodless way.

“One is left with the idea that perhaps someone felt that the mere fact of his or her having read it was enough to cast suspicion in his direction, since the method of poisoning—nicotine is decidedly unusual—was gained from Oliver Fairleigh's book.”

“I see,” said Gerald Simmington doubtfully. “It doesn't seem to narrow the field very much, does it?”

“Oh, the field is enormous,” said Meredith cheerfully. “Again
and again I've come back to the sort of man Oliver Fairleigh was. They sent me a transcript of his broadcast at the BBC—fascinating! He obviously wanted more than anything in the world to shock or annoy as many people as possible. That's evident too from his behavior at the Woodstocks'. Dreadful and quite unwarranted—and just to draw attention to himself. With a man like that the net is inevitably wide.”

“And he must have been enormously difficult to live with,” said Mr. Simmington, blinking sympathetically. He had not touched his drink, perhaps fascinated by the conversation, perhaps out of politeness because he felt he could not offer a police officer one.

“Of course, of course, hideously difficult,” said Meredith. “Though there again, I have a very slight feeling that—how should one put it?—his bark was worse than his bite.”

Meredith's diamond-sharp eyes noticed that Mr. Simmington wasn't willing to accept this: his eyebrows rose a mere fraction, in polite skepticism. “Of course, we here are not the best people to say,” he said doubtfully. “There was no particular reason for him to bite us. But still—”

“Don't get the wrong idea,” said Meredith. “As soon as one uses a phrase like that, people get the idea you're suggesting that underneath that rough exterior there lurked a heart of gold. Nothing of the sort, of course. I mean precisely what I say. Mostly Oliver Fairleigh's malice, desire for attention, enjoyment of outrage and chaos, exhausted itself in words. If he had created a scene, he was happy. He seldom took it further than that. He behaved appallingly to Mark, but he didn't change his will. He behaved appallingly at the Woodstocks', but he proposed to introduce the young man to Sir Edwin. He—but that's another matter. Of course, on the surface it would
seem
that those closest to him had the best motive for killing him. But it may well be that his family subconsciously appreciated how much of his awfulness was mere words.”

“You may be right,” said Simmington, still showing skepticism.

“As a matter of fact there are quite a lot of reasons for thinking the immediate family are not necessarily the most likely suspects
in this case. If the poison was put into the decanter just before Sir Oliver drank the lakka, why was such a risky method chosen? The family would have had so many better opportunities than that, so many safer ones.”

“Possibly because there were outsiders present...,” suggested Simmington, very tentatively.

“Only the Woodstocks. It would be a perverse policeman who would suspect them rather than the immediate family. Again, if the idea was to use Mark's outburst at the Prince Albert to make him prime suspect, the poison can surely not have been put in the decanter during the opening of the birthday presents, immediately before the toast. Because by then Mark was out to the world, and likely to be for some time to come. It would have to be done earlier, either earlier in the day—Bella arrived in the morning—or earlier in the week—Terence had been in the house some days.”

“I see,” said Simmington. “That seems logical.”

Meredith, his eye resting on Simmington's whisky for no reason he could think of, felt he had got into his best expositional style. This was the kind of thing Simmington ought to like.

“Of course, leaving aside Lady Fairleigh—it is difficult to imagine her trying to implicate her eldest son—both Bella and Terence are very tempting as suspects. Terry especially, perhaps.”

“There have been rumors,” murmured Simmington.

“There is one big factor against him, though. He was—we are pretty sure—trying to implicate his brother in the drug traffic, with a view to making a big stink that would finally settle his hash as far as his father was concerned. Not a nice young man, Terry, as Miss Thorrington said. Now, he hadn't succeeded in this, but he must surely still have had hopes that he might. He would hardly embark on a further project to involve him in something criminal so soon. More particularly, since the aim was to get Mark cut out of his father's will, he most certainly wouldn't involve him in the killing of his father—that really would be killing the goose that was intended to lay Terence's golden egg! The idea is quite crazy. By and large, neither Terence nor Bella could have
wanted Sir Oliver dead until they were quite sure Mark was cut out of the will, and so far there had apparently been no discussion of it in the family, so they certainly couldn't know. Of course it's just possible the dose was not intended to be fatal. But I have the impression that both Terence and Bella would have calculated the dose to a nicety.”

“One comes back to the brute fact that it is Mark who benefits,” said Gerald Simmington. “Though of course he's impossible.”

“Not
impossible,”
said Meredith. “Oh, Mark is a wonderful suspect, no doubt about it. Everything perfect except opportunity. Only provide the opportunity, and—bingo! The five-card trick done again to perfection. But I haven't, as yet, found the opportunity. And you know, if I were Mark and my alibi depended on my congenital drunkenness—I don't think I would have sobered up so conspicuously the day after the murder, would you?”

“Not the family, then,” said Simmington.

“I'm a cautious policeman,” said Meredith, “not Hercule Poirot relying on his little gray cells. Let's say I don't think the family are as good bets as I imagine most outsiders are thinking they are.”

“I confess, I have been thinking along those lines. I do take your point, though.”

“Perhaps the best approach to the whole case,” said Meredith, his eyes now straying to the colorful dust jackets on Simmington's shelves, “is the practical one: who had a chance to poison the decanter? Did those people have a motive? Here again one encounters difficulties. There were two names that sprang to mind in answer to the first question. Unfortunately, the second question then becomes peculiarly difficult. On the surface the answer would seem to be: no motive at all.”

“But you can't accept that?”

“I can't accept it without a bit of background digging. And then again—how far is a
bit
of background digging going to get you? Sir Oliver's life was—how shall I say?—full of incident. I decided the best line to work on was the assumption that a motive for murder is not, as a rule, trivial. If it came from Oliver Fairleigh's
past, it would probably be something big—perhaps, therefore, something he wanted to keep quiet, but by the same token very possibly something not irrecoverable, even today.”

“I see, the Ross Macdonald type of plot,” murmured Simmington.

“Something like that,” said Meredith, not quite sure what he was talking about. “I wanted to bring a few things together: the people who had the most opportunity; the attempt to implicate Mark Fairleigh; the motive; the fact that this seemed, somehow, a haphazard sort of crime—”

“Haphazard?”

“Improvised. More or less spur-of-the-moment. That all along was my impression. Not a murderer of devilish cunning at all—and therefore not one likely to have concocted any infallible plan. The poison did actually kill Sir Oliver, but equally it could well have killed someone else instead. So, anyway, what do I do? I look first of all at my two people with the best opportunity to poison the decanter. I look for a start at Surtees.”

“Surtees?”

“He had the key to the drinks cupboard in the study some minutes before the rest came in, and before Mark went out like a light. Surtees: thirty-eight years old, I found; one marriage in the past; running a nice little business selling information to Sir Oliver and screwing his daughter as a return for doing the same service. Did he have serious designs, as they say, on Bella? If so, he didn't know his girl. Did he kill Sir Oliver assuming Bella was his heir? Possibly, because he
did
think that. But it doesn't seem in character to go quite so far on such a rash assumption. No—unless there was something else in the background waiting to be dug out, one can only say Surtees would have to be a very impulsive, irrational murderer, and this doesn't seem to conform to his type.”

“I see. And—the other?”

“The other, Mr. Simmington, is you.”

Meredith let his eyes rest on the man's face. There was no change there whatsoever, not a flicker of fear or chagrin. He
remained what he had been since the interview began: a sandy-haired, opaque nonentity.