To Love and Be Wise (17 page)

It was surprising, too, to find that Marguerite Merriam (daughter of Geoffrey Merriam and his wife Brenda (Mattson)) had been considerably older than her adolescent fragility had led one to believe. Perhaps if she had lived that adolescent quality would have worn thin, and her power to break the public heart would have declined. That was, no doubt, what Marta had meant when she said that if she had lived another ten years her obituaries would have been back-page stuff.

Marta (daughter of Gervase Wing-Strutt, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. and his wife Anne (Hallard)) was, of course, entirely orthodox. She had been educated at the best schools and had sneaked her way on to the stage by the back-door of elocution like so many of her well-bred predecessors. Grant hoped that when in the next edition—or at most the next after—the letters D.B.E. followed Marta's name, it would comfort Gervase Wing-Strutt and his wife Anne for being fooled by their daughter a quarter of a century ago.

He had not even taken the cream off the possible entertainment provided by this enchanting volume when the telephone rang.

'Your call to London is through. Will you go ahead, please,' the voice said.

'Hullo,' Grant said. 'Could I speak to Miss Searle?'

'Miss Searle speaking,' said a pleasant voice, a shade on the efficient side.

'Miss Searle, I'm truly sorry to bother you, but have you, by any chance, a cousin called Leslie Searle?'

'I have, and if he has borrowed money from you you are wasting your time if you think that I will pay it back.'

'Oh, no. It is nothing like that. Your cousin has disappeared while staying with friends in the country and we hoped that you might help us to trace him. My name is Grant. I'm a Detective-Inspector at Scotland Yard.'

'Oh,' said the voice, considering but not apparently dismayed. 'Well, I don't see what help I can be to you. Leslie and I never had much to do with each other. He wasn't my cup of tea, and I certainly am not his.'

'It would be some help if I could come and talk to you about him. Would you, perhaps, be at home tomorrow afternoon if I called?'

'Well, tomorrow afternoon I was going to a concert at the Albert Hall.'

'Oh. Then I might manage it just before lunch if that is any better for you.'

'You are very accommodating for a policeman,' she remarked.

'Criminals don't find us that way,' he said.

'I thought providing accommodation for criminals was the end and object of Scotland Yard. It's all right, Inspector. I won't go to the concert. It is not a very good one anyhow.'

'You'll be in if I call?'

'Yes, I'll be here.'

'That is very kind of you.'

'That over-rated photographer didn't take the family jewels with him when he left, did he?'

'No. Oh, no. He has just disappeared.'

She gave a small snort. It was apparent that whatever Miss Searle had to tell him about her cousin there would be no suppression of facts or false modesty in her story.

As Grant hung up, Marta came back preceded by a small boy carrying wood for the fire. The boy put the logs neatly in the hearth, and then eyed Grant with respectful awe.

'Tommy has something he wants to ask you,' Marta said. 'He knows that you are a detective.'

'What is it, Tommy?'

'Will you show me your revolver, sir?'

'I would if I had it with me. But it's in a drawer in Scotland Yard, I'm afraid.'

Tommy looked cut to the heart. 'I thought you always carried one. The American cops do. You
can
shoot, can't you, sir?'

'Oh, yes,' Grant said relieving the awful fear that was clearly dawning. 'I'll tell you what, next time you come to London, you can come to Scotland Yard and I'll show you the revolver.'

'I can come to the
Yard
? Oh, thank you. Thank you very much, sir. That would be just bonza.'

He went, with a polite goodnight, in an aura of radiance a foot thick.

'And parents think they can cure boys of liking lethal weapons by not giving them toy soldiers,' Marta said, as she set the omelet out on the table. 'Come and eat.'

'I owe you for a trunk call to London.'

'I thought that you were going to relax.'

'I was but I got an idea, and it has taken me the first step forward in this case since I took it over.'

'Good!' she said. 'Now you can feel happy and let your digestive juices do their work.'

A small round table had been set near the fire, with candles for pleasure and decoration, and they ate together in a friendly quiet. Mrs Thrupp came up with the chicken, and was introduced, and was volubly grateful for Grant's invitation to Tommy. After that peace was uninterrupted. Over coffee the talk went to Silas Weekley and the oddness of the ménage in the lane.

'Silas prides himself on living "working-class", whatever that may mean. None of his children is going to begin any better off than he did. He's a frightful bore about his elementary school origins. You would think he was the first elementary schoolboy to go to Oxford since the place was founded. He's the classic case of inverted snobbery.'

'But what does he do with all the money he makes?'

'God knows. Buries it under the floor of that little hut where he works, perhaps. No one is ever allowed to go inside that hut.'

'I interviewed him in that hut this morning.'

'Alan! How clever of you! What was inside?'

'One well-known writer, doing very little work.'

'I expect he sweats blood over his writing. He has no imagination, you know. I mean, he has no idea how another person's mind works. So his situations, and his characters' reaction to the situations, are all clichés. He sells because of his "earthiness", his "elemental strength", God save us all. Let us push back the table and get nearer the fire.'

She opened a cupboard, and said in an excellent imitation of the boys who used to sell things off trays on railway platforms: 'Drambuie, Benedictine, Strega, Grand Marnier, Bols, Chartreuse, Slivovitz, Armagnac, Cognac, Rakia, Kümmel, Various French Sirops of Unspeakable Sweetness, and Mrs Thrupp's Ginger Cordial!'

'Is it your intention to seduce official secrets from the Criminal Investigation Department?'

'No, darling; I am offering homage to your palate. You are one of the few men I know who possesses such a thing.'

She put the Chartreuse and the liqueur glasses on a tray and arranged her long legs in comfort on the couch.

'Now tell me,' she said.

'But I have nothing to tell,' he protested.

'I don't mean that kind of tell. I mean talk at me. Pretend I'm your wife—which God forbid—and just make an audience of me. For instance, you don't really think that that poor stick Walter Whitmore ever got up enough red blood to tap the Searle boy on the head, do you?'

'No, I don't think so. Sergeant Williams calls Walter a push-ee, and I think I agree with him.'

'Calls him a what?'

Grant explained, and Marta said: 'And how right your Sergeant Williams is! Walter's taking-off is long overdue.'

'He may do his own taking-off if this affair isn't cleared up.'

'Yes, I suppose he is having a bad time, poor silly creature. The gossip in a small country place is deadly. Have you had any answer to your police appeal, by the way? I heard it at one o'clock.'

'No, not up to six-forty-five, when I last talked to the Yard. I gave them this number for the next two hours. I hope you don't mind.'

'Why do you think he might have been given a lift?'

'Because if he isn't in the river he must have walked away from it.'

'Of his own accord? But that would be a very odd thing to do.'

'He may be suffering from amnesia. There are five possibilities altogether.'

'Five!'

'On Wednesday night Searle walked away down that lane, healthy and sober; and he has not been near since. The possibilities are: one, that he fell into the water accidentally and was drowned; two, that he was murdered and thrown in the river; three, that he walked away for reasons of his own; four, that he wandered away because he forgot who he was and where he was going; five, that he was kidnapped.'

'Kidnapped!'

'We don't know anything about his American life; we have to make allowances for that. He may even have come to this country to get away from the States for a little. I shan't know about that until we have a report about him from the Coast—if then! Tell me, what did
you
think of Searle?'

'In what way?'

'Well, would you say he was a practical joker, for instance?'

'Anything but.'

'Yes. Liz Garrowby was against that too. She said he wouldn't think a practical joke funny. How impressed do you think he was with Liz Garrowby? You were there to dinner.'

'Impressed enough to make Walter sick with jealousy.'

'Really?'

'They were nice together, Leslie and Liz. They were a natural pair, somehow. Something that Walter and Liz will never be. I don't think Walter knows anything about Liz; and I had an idea that Leslie Searle knew quite a lot.'

'Did you like him when you met him? You took him back with you that night, after dinner.'

'Yes. Yes to both. I liked him with reservations.'

'What kind of reservations?'

'It's difficult to describe. I could hardly take my eyes off him, and yet he never struck me as being—real. That sounds mad, doesn't it.'

'You mean there was something phony about him?'

'Not in the accepted sense. He was obviously what he said he was. In any case, our Miss Easton-Dixon bears witness to that, as you probably know.'

'Yes, I was talking to Miss Easton-Dixon this afternoon about him. Her photograph of him may prove very useful. What did you and Searle talk about, the night you brought him back with you?'

'Oh, cabbages and kings. People he had photographed. People we had both met. People he wanted to meet. We spent a long time in mutual adoring of Danny Minsky, and another long time in furious disagreement about Marguerite Merriam. Like everyone else he thought Marguerite the world's genius, and wouldn't hear a word against her. I got so annoyed with him that I told him a few home-truths about Marguerite. I was ashamed of myself afterwards. It's a mean thing to break children's toys.'

'I expect it did him good. He was too old to have the facts of life kept from him.'

'I hear you've been collecting alibis today.'

'How did you hear?'

'The way I hear everything. From Mrs Thrupp. Who are the unlucky people who have none?'

'Practically the whole village, including Miss Easton-Dixon.'

'Our Dixie is "out". Who else?'

'Miss Lavinia Fitch.'

'
Dear
Lavinia!' Marta said, laughing outright at the thought of Miss Fitch on murder bent.

'Liz Garrowby?'

'Poor Liz must be having a thin time over this. I think she was half in love with the boy.'

'Mrs Garrowby?'

Marta paused to consider this. 'Do you know, I wouldn't put it past the woman. She would do it and not turn a hair because she would persuade herself that it was the right thing to do. She'd even go to church afterwards and ask God's blessing on it.'

'Toby Tullis?'

'N-o, I hardly think so. Toby would find some other way of getting even. Something much less risky for Toby and just as satisfying. Toby is fertile in inventing small revenges. I don't think he would need to murder anyone.'

'Silas Weekley?'

'I wonder. I wonder. Yes, I think Silas would commit murder. Especially if the book he happened to be writing at the moment was not going well. The books are Silas's outlet for his hatred, you see. If that was dammed up he might kill someone. Someone who seemed to him rich and well-favoured and undeservedly fortunate.'

'You think Weekley mad?'

'Oh, yes. Not certifiable perhaps, but definitely unbalanced. Is there any truth, by the way, in the rumour of a quarrel between Walter and the Searle boy?'

'Whitmore denies that it was a quarrel. He says it was "just a spat".'

'So there
was
bad feeling between them?'

'I don't know if we have even evidence for that. A temporary annoyance is hardly the same thing as bad feeling. Men can disagree quite fundamentally in a pub of an evening without any fundamental bad feeling on either side.'

'Oh, you are maddening. Of course there was bad feeling, and of course we know why. It was about Liz.'

'Having no connections in the Fourth Dimension, I couldn't say,' Grant said, mocking her jumped-to conclusion. 'Whitmore said Searle was "provocative". What, can you tell me from your point of vantage, would he be provocative about?'

'He probably told Walter how little he appreciated Liz, and that if Walter didn't mend his ways he would take Liz from him, and if Walter thought he wasn't up to it he was wrong and he would get Liz to pack and walk away with him by a week next Tuesday, and there was five pounds that said he was right. And Walter said, very huffy and stiff, that in this country we did not bet on the possible bestowal of women's favours, at least gentlemen didn't, and to put five pounds on Liz was simply insulting (Walter has no sense of the ridiculous at all, you know; that is how he perpetrates those broadcasts and endears himself to old ladies who avoid the country like the plague and wouldn't know a wren if they saw one); and Leslie probably said that if he thought a fiver too little he was willing to make it ten, since if Liz had been engaged to a prig like Walter for nearly twelve months she was just ripe for a change and the ten would be just found money, and so then Walter got up and went out and banged the door behind him.'

'How did you know about the banged door?'

'My dear soul, everyone in Orfordshire knows about the banged door by this time. That is why Walter is suspect Number One. Is that all your list of Lacking Alibis, by the way?'

'No, there is Serge Ratoff.'

'Oh. What was Serge doing?'

'Dancing on the greensward by the river in the dark.'

'That has the ring of truth, anyhow.'

'Why? Have you seen him?'

'No. But it is just the kind of thing Serge would do. He is still full of the idea of a come-back, you know. Before the scene about Leslie Searle, he was planning the come-back as a way of pleasing Toby; now he is planning it just to "show" Toby.'