Death of a Mystery Writer (25 page)

“I see,” said Gerald Simmington neutrally.

“Opportunity: the Sunday before the actual murder, when you both had liqueurs together. Sir Oliver broadcast it around fairly freely that under doctor's orders he drank liqueurs and spirits only at weekends. You could poison the lakka on Sunday and be fairly certain he would not drink it until the following Saturday.”

“No doubt that is true,” said Gerald Simmington, not departing from his civil-service tones. “As I explained to you in our previous talk, we were together after dinner for a very short time, and Sir Oliver did not leave the room. However, I quite realize that is merely my own uncorroborated word.”

“Precisely. And you also say that Sir Oliver fetched the typescript of
Murder Upstairs and Downstairs,
all but the last chapters. Miss Cozzens tells me this was after dinner.”

“After dinner, but—oh, I'm sorry, I interrupted you.” He looked at Meredith courteously, his eyes blank of any other expression.

“So, I look into your background. Age—thirty-two. An Oxford second in nineteen sixty-seven. Began working for Macpherson's in nineteen seventy. Unmarried.”

“Not much to tell, I'm afraid,” said Gerald Simmington apologetically.

“I found the age interesting, though,” said Meredith. Mr. Simmington had folded his fingers together in his characteristic little pyramid, and was showing no sign of emotion. Once again Meredith found his eyes being caught by the glass of whisky at his right hand. “Your birthdate—nineteen forty-five—I had already found that rather an interesting period in Oliver Fairleigh's life. So I looked further into your background. Your mother—”

“My mother—” Mr. Simmington's voice, astonishingly, came loud and clear, and he held up his hand in a gesture that was almost commanding. “I would prefer to talk about my mother myself.”

“Please do,” said Meredith, adopting Simmington's old neutrality.

“My mother was a very remarkable woman. Only I was in a position to understand just
how
remarkable. If she hadn't fallen in the way of Oliver Fairleigh—anyway, as you will be able very easily to find out, she was a working-class girl, born in Bradford. Both her parents were millworkers. She got to grammar school, then to domestic science college. She had been there two years in nineteen forty, but she joined up. She was with the ATS in Italy when she met up with Oliver Fairleigh in late nineteen forty-three. He'd been lecturing—wonderfully ironic—on ‘Toward a Classless Postwar Britain.' She asked a question, and they talked afterward. They became friends, then lovers. They intended to get married as soon as the war ended—or she did. She did.”

Gerald Simmington's voice, which had been strong and convincing, faded into silence for a moment. But his whole manner had lost its air of apology and withdrawal—as if he were emerging blessedly into life after long years of hibernation. He took a breath, then went on:

“I don't suppose he ever intended it—marriage, I mean. At any rate, if he did, it didn't survive his visit to her home, my grandparents' home. He had leave in forty-four, to write about the Italian campaign. She wangled leave at the same time, and they were together in London. I don't think things were going too well between them even then. Then they went to Bradford. My grandfather was a fine man, an original. He was a millworker through and through—a trade union man, a Labour party man. He had his views, he argued them, he never pulled his punches. He hated drawing room radicals. He and Oliver Fairleigh loathed each other on sight. In fact, Oliver Fairleigh loathed everything about working-class life—the town, the food, the mateyness, the manners. My mother said those days in Bradford—it was as if he were being physically sick every minute of the day.”

“And that was the end of the relationship?”

“Yes. They quarreled. He'd been looking for an excuse for leaving.
She was already pregnant, but she didn't tell him until later, till just before I was born. By then things were changing with him. The war was all but over, he'd had his first book accepted, he had changed his politics and was even looking for a constituency to adopt him, though none of the local Conservative associations could stomach his swift conversion, so he didn't get one at that time. Anyway, he and my mother came to a financial arrangement, and he was rid of us both. I imagine very few apart from him and my mother knew about the episode at all.”

“I rather think someone called Darcy Howard knew,” said Meredith, “and made a little bit out of Oliver Fairleigh as a reward for keeping his knowledge to himself.” He had noticed a flicker of recognition at the mention of the name, and decided that Darcy had already begun negotiations designed to continue his subsidy. At his age, presumably, one could afford to live a bit dangerously.

“That, anyway, was what happened,” said Gerald Simmington. “I suppose it was a common enough sort of episode at the time.”

“Why do you bear such a grudge, then?”

Gerald Simmington looked quite steadily at Meredith. “I've not said I bear a grudge. I'm telling you about my mother. Telling you things you can quite easily find out from others. Well, what more is there? My mother lived for a time with her parents, but it wasn't pleasant—with everyone knowing. And she thought about me growing up. She always thought about me. She was a saint. So we moved to London, where she passed as a war widow. We lived in a shabby area, near Alexandra Palace, in fact, and we just about managed on the pittance she got from Fairleigh. It went less and less far as the years went by, of course, but when I began school she could take part-time jobs. There were always extras needed, of course: school uniforms, holidays for me abroad—I was good at languages. Then she might have to ring up Oliver Fairleigh.” His mouth twisted in distaste.

“Was that wise?” asked Meredith.

“Wise? She didn't think of whether it was
wise.
She did it for me. And of course the money always came. As you say, his bark was worse than his bite. But perhaps it would have been better not to have given the money and not to have barked either. She had to put up with—well, you can guess: revolting insults, innuendos, abuse. He was a hateful bully. When I got to Oxford, of course, I had a grant, and she didn't need to go to him anymore. Except once.”

The sharper, newly awakened eyes met Meredith's, and a hand went nervously toward the whisky glass, then drew back. “Of course, you would know that. That would be easy enough to guess. I was teaching at the time. I'd got a good second, but teaching was about the only thing that seemed open. It was sheer misery, every minute of the day. I don't think there
is
any torture more awful than an incompetent teacher suffers. I was at the end of my tether. My mother rang Oliver Fairleigh and asked if he could get me a job in publishing. With the usual result. Outrage, insult, refusal. But of course in the end he did it—he got me in here.”

Meredith almost asked if he hadn't been grateful—but he realized at once that this has been the worst thing of all, the ultimate insult: he had had to take help from Oliver Fairleigh; he had put himself in a position where gratitude was in order.

“Two years after that, my mother died. She had overworked for years, and was not strong. She had influenza which developed into pneumonia, and it carried her off. That is the story of my mother, Inspector.”

“And since he got you in here, your relations with Oliver Fairleigh have been—?”

“Perfectly normal. When I saw him for the first time he treated me like any other junior employee of the firm. He's gone on doing that—getting perhaps marginally politer as I worked my way up.”

“I suppose it was early on when he gave you the manuscript of
Black Widow?”

The new, liberated Gerald Simmington—no longer under the pressure of any personal emotion, and seemingly totally relaxed—leaned
back in his chair, and even grinned broadly. He looked almost happy. Meredith noticed suddenly that he was quite a large man, and rather a good-looking one.

“Come, come, Inspector. Surely senior police officers don't try to play childish tricks like that. I've told you some facts that you could very easily have found out for yourself—from public records, friends, Sir Edwin. If you wish to believe that I killed my—killed Sir Oliver, that's up to you. I admit no such thing. And I very much doubt whether you could put together any sort of case.”

“At the moment it would be mainly circumstantial,” admitted Meredith. “Let me tell you, then, how I see the sequence of events. Some of my guesswork will be quite easy to check up on, I think. First of all, you were in the Wycherley area the weekend before the murder, but not necessarily with that intention in mind, not immediately. More or less by chance you happened to be in the Prince Albert at the time of Mark Farleigh's outburst.”

“Oh, really?” Gerald Simmington raised his eyebrows.

“I have one witness to a ‘sandy-haired man in the corner, with an evening paper,' which I take to be you. I will arrange an identity parade to confirm that—if necessary separate identity parades in which you can be picked out by everyone who was in the pub that night.” Something of the old Gerald Simmington returned in the expression of fastidious distaste that crossed his face at the idea. “As I say, I think the notion of killing your father was already in your mind, and had been since your mother died. I think hearing Mark Fairleigh threaten his father brought it to the forefront of your thoughts. I think you then rang Wycherley Court and were invited the next night to dinner.”

“I had a standing invitation,” said Gerald Simmington. “He would always say: ‘If you're ever down our way . . .' You know how it is. But I knew the sort of pleasure it would give Fairleigh to have his bastard eating at the same table as his wife. He was a connoisseur of that sort of situation.”

“Fine, the picture is emerging,” said Meredith genially. “You rang, then, said you were in the area and wanted to talk over
Murder Upstairs and Downstairs,
which was overdue. You were invited along to dinner. And you went prepared—with nicotine.”

“Which I just happened to have with me.”

“It's very easy to obtain, as you knew from reading
Black Widow.
Getting it needed no special measures on your part. And of course the victim already suffered from heart trouble, so no great amounts were needed. I think you already knew two things that turned out to be vitally important: Oliver Fairleigh's regimen as far as drink was concerned—he was always broadcasting it around—and the fact that his birthday dinner was imminent, an occasion which all the family was accustomed to attend. You confirmed in your conversation that night that Fairleigh was unlikely to touch liqueurs or spirits between that night and the next Saturday, when all the family would be around. Just before you left you persuaded him to get the completed portion of
Upstairs and Downstairs,
so that you could begin editorial work on it. Did you see the mock bookcase then, with the references to your mother's story? Perhaps. Or perhaps Sir Oliver drew your attention to it himself. Anyway, while he was out you put the nicotine in the lakka. The poison was likely, over a period of time, to discolor it, make it brown, but it is already a deep yellow, and the study is badly lit. Oliver Fairleigh certainly wouldn't notice, and in fact our lab boys, though they
thought
it had been put in some little time before Oliver Fairleigh died, couldn't be sure. It was a very clever piece of work indeed.”

“I'm sure the murderer would be grateful to you for your good opinion,” said Gerald Simmington. “It rather underlines the fact that so far you have no case whatsoever. Even a poor little editor glutted on garbled detective fiction can see that.”

“I don't think things went
quite
so well for you after that, though,” said Meredith, trying to keep up the tone of unabated geniality which had somehow crept into the conversation. “Because it was a very hastily decided on murder—hence the feeling I get of improvisation. In that sort of circumstance, little things have a habit of going wrong.”

“Like, for example?”

“Well, like
Black Widow,
notably. I expect when you'd got the poison into the lakka you came home and hugged yourself on your cleverness in using one of Oliver Fairleigh's methods, and obtaining the poison as he told you. And then you thought: now which book of his was it where the nicotine was used and the details given? And you looked along your shelves, and you couldn't find it—and you realized it was in the book that you, and only you, had read. Damning!”

“Hardly that, Inspector. Hardly more than mildly corroborative.”

“But it could never be published. Because people would read it, and comment, and the police would look into it. And they would be coming, inevitably, to you—and wondering who you were. Your great strength was how few knew that—not even, I suppose, Sir Edwin. So the book had to be suppressed. It had been given to you just after you started work, after Miss Thorrington left. I suppose you put it in the vaults here, or the Oliver Fairleigh archive.”

“They're chaos, the firm's records,” said Gerald Simmington disapprovingly.

“Luckily. So you got it out, and then had to pretend the manuscript must be at Wycherley. Improvised, you see. A bit last-minute.”

“It would—taking your story as a piece of fiction—have worked quite well if Oliver Fairleigh hadn't left the copyright to his wife.”

“It would have worked only until Sir Edwin started making inquiries about the posthumous work,” corrected Meredith. “And that would have been soon enough, I daresay. Anyway, this little detail panicked you, and then the plot to incriminate Mark misfired completely because he was so drunk, and then you started thrashing around.”