by Evelyn James
“Huh!” Ethel Kemp’s scowl had deepened. “Well, my Henry knew better than to get involved with a woman. He was loyal to his mother.”
Captain O’Harris was stood behind Mrs Kemp and he cast a wide-eyed look of amazement at Clara. She was concentrating on Ethel.
“You did not want your son to marry?” She asked.
“Certainly, certainly,” Ethel Kemp quickly backtracked. “But he would never find anyone who knew how to take care of him like I do. I know all his quirks and dislikes. There was no woman out there good enough for him. So, I don’t know what this Miss Dodd was doing getting herself all emotional over him.”
Bill Kemp cast an apologetic look in Clara’s direction. He lifted his hands up, the palms out in a gesture of – see what I mean? Clara was beginning to feel sorry for Henry.
Ethel Kemp was laying out the tea things on a small table she had brought before the sofa.
“Henry had a good life with us. We are comfortable,” she carried on. “How could anyone compete with that? What did he need with someone else? Some stranger? Henry was never good at making friends, he was a family person.”
The cups rattled rather fiercely in their saucers as she plonked them down.
“Henry did not need company. He was content by himself.”
Clara wanted to interrupt this rant and point out that Ethel Kemp had made that decision for her son, and that he had been too ‘innocuous’, as his father had put it, to fight her. However, there was little sense in offending the woman. Henry was dead and whatever he had needed or did not need was now a moot point.
“Henry Kemp knew a lot about wine,” Clara changed the subject.
“He knew what he needed to know,” Ethel Kemp maintained. “He was extremely professional.”
“What did he drink when he was at home?” Clara was trying to ease into the topic of Henry’s heavy drinking. There was no way Ethel would allow her son to be called an alcoholic in her presence, but she might let something useful slip.
“Drink at home?” Ethel Kemp looked at Clara in amazement. “There is not a drop of drink in this house! We are a teetotal family. Something that always made me uncomfortable with Henry’s work. None of us ever touched a drop.”
Clara was so stunned by this response that for a second she could not think what to say. Bill Kemp was staring at her, something about his face suggesting he wanted to speak, but didn’t dare before his wife. He suddenly turned to Ethel.
“My dear, I feel the need for one of my pain tablets,” he said.
“Oh Bill,” Ethel sighed. “Can’t it wait until after we have drunk tea?”
“No, my dear,” Bill said, pulling a face. “I am starting to feel so uncomfortable.”
Ethel Kemp looked at Clara with an expression of apology.
“I shall go and fetch it.”
She rose and left. Bill Kemp turned to Clara sharply.
“The pill has to be dissolved in water, it will take her a while. I was aware that Henry was drinking. Up until recently he never had a drop in the house, but, the last few weeks I had a hunch he was drinking in his bedroom. He keeps it locked, so his mother cannot get in.”
Clara found this intriguing. If there was any clue as to a motive for Henry’s murder, she hoped it might be among his private belongings.
“Might I take a look in his room?” She asked Bill Kemp.
“You may,” Bill said. “But you will need to find the key. Henry always kept it with him.”
Clara was puzzled; they had not found a key on Henry.
“Henry began drinking more heavily in recent months,” Captain O’Harris said. “Do you have any ideas why?”
Bill Kemp pursed his lips.
“Henry was very private, but I am certain something was upsetting him. He was not himself,” Bill rubbed at his lower lip. “It was as if he knew a secret that was gnawing at him. I was worried for him.”
“A secret?” Clara became excited. “A secret that, perhaps, cost him his life?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ethel Kemp did not like the idea of anyone entering her son’s bedroom.
“It was his private space.”
“Ethel, my dear, Henry is gone and these people are trying their hardest to discover who killed him. If they can find a clue to his murderer in his bedroom, surely that is a good thing?” Bill Kemp spoke patiently.
His wife’s mouth twisted and turned like she was sucking on an extremely sour sweet.
“Henry never let me in there,” she declared, and Clara felt that here was the nub of the problem.
Ethel Kemp was an extremely jealous and insecure woman. She wanted to pry into every detail of her son’s life and control him so completely that he never did anything outside of her direction. Henry Kemp had countered that in one small way, by preventing her from accessing his bedroom. It was the one place where he could be in complete privacy.
Clara speculated that some of Henry’s drinking issues stemmed from his unhealthy relationship with his mother and her ability to overpower him and make him feel as if his life was not his own. It still amazed Clara at how selfish some people could be, and how they muddled up that selfishness with caring for someone. Henry had been surrounded by people who used him for their own ends while never giving a thought for how he was affected. Not just his mother, but the Noble family who had treated his murder as an awkward inconvenience. And then there was Simon Noble who, no doubt, killed Henry for his own selfish ends. Only Miss Dodd had truly cared about him.
“Henry kept nothing personal in his office,” Clara explained to Ethel Kemp as patiently as Bill Kemp had spoken to his wife, though she was really rather fed-up with the delay. “There might be something in his bedroom that could tell me why he was killed. A diary, perhaps, or a letter. Some clue that I can present to the police as evidence.”
“It’s locked,” Ethel grumbled, clutching to a final straw. “Henry said there had to be some place I could not go. He said it to my face.”
Ethel looked affronted.
“He wouldn’t even let me clean in there!”
“The lock might be breakable,” Captain O’Harris said to Clara.
“Breakable!” Ethel Kemp gasped in horror.
“Ethel!” Bill Kemp was doing his best to sit up on the sofa, his face was flushed with anger. “Let them in the damn room! Our son is dead! Do you not hear yourself? Dead and you argue about such stupidity as a locked room!”
“Do not call me stupid, Bill,” Ethel rebuked him, but her voice wavered with tears. “I can’t see how entering Henry’s bedroom will bring him back.”
“It won’t!” Bill replied to her in exasperation. “But it might mean they can find the proof that will put a killer behind bars! I want to see justice done for our son, even if you don’t!”
“I never said I didn’t!” Tears fell down Ethel’s face. “You are too harsh to me Bill Kemp. Henry was my blessing, my precious boy. I shall never be the same without him.”
“Let them in the damn room!”
“Do not swear at me!” Ethel screamed. “None of you know how I am feeling, none of you! I have lost my boy, my only boy! Nothing will ever be the same, nothing! You can all do as you please, but leave me alone!”
With that, Ethel Kemp fled from the room and a moment later they heard the slamming of a door. She had retreated to her bedroom.
“I apologise for that,” Bill said softly. “Ethel has been blind for so long to what others need. I should have stood up to her while Henry was alive. I should have made him move out, but he felt duty-bound to look after us. We have no income other than what Henry brings in.”
Bill Kemp paused.
“It was just easier to say nothing. I am a cripple and I need Ethel’s help. I suppose I felt fighting her too strongly would be to my detriment, so I allowed her to overwhelm Henry and keep him from having a real life away from us. I am not proud of the fact. It took his death to realise how much I had simply taken him for granted.”
<
br /> Bill pulled the blanket up a little, using it as a sort of protection from the world, like hiding beneath the bedsheets at night when a noise scares you. He was a very frightened man, one whose own life had been taken out of his control. He was completely dependent on Ethel for the most mundane of tasks, and the flipside of that dependency was that she was able to take charge of every aspect of his existence. The distress and despair this caused him was palpable.
“Go open Henry’s room any way you have to,” Bill said quietly. “I’ll deal with Ethel. And, find the person who did this to my son.”
“I will,” Clara promised him. Then she left the room and stood in the hall for a moment, glancing about to see which room might have been Henry’s.
The cottage was almost square and the hallways formed a cross in its centre, dividing it into quarters. At the front was the parlour where Bill Kemp sat and opposite was the kitchen. The hall was then intersected by another corridor that ran behind the two front rooms. Three doors faced onto this corridor. At least two were bedrooms and Clara guessed the third would be for some sort of bathroom. Bill Kemp would need a bespoke space for his personal needs, preferably indoors. These three rooms were split unevenly by the main hallway, which ran from the front door to a backdoor that was almost perfectly opposite the former. The unevenness of the divide meant that the room on the right of the hallway stood alone and was slighter bigger than the bedroom on the left, which had some of its space taken up by the bathroom. Clara’s instinct was that the room on the right was Henry’s. His father would need easy access to the bathroom and it made better sense for his parents to have the left bedroom.
Clara walked over to the door and depressed the metal handle, it was old and curved, made of iron and then painted black. The handle dropped but the door did not budge.
“Can I have a look?” O’Harris asked from behind her.
Clara stepped out of his way and he jiggled the handle up and down thoughtfully a few times, before crouching down and staring through the keyhole.
“It’s a pretty old lock,” he said. “We have some similar in my house. I learned how to pick them. We had one on a cupboard that was rather prone to locking itself. The key had been lost to it years ago, so we learned how to crudely pick it. Saves on calling out the locksmith.”
“You could have changed the lock,” Clara pointed out.
“You don’t stay rich in this day and age by spending money frivolously,” O’Harris grinned at her.
He depressed the handle again.
“What I need is a screwdriver, or something similar.”
Clara walked to the kitchen and started to search through the drawers. She half expected Ethel Kemp to appear and berate her for going through her kitchen, but the woman did not emerge from the bedroom. Clara was feeling ashamed that things had reached such a point that the woman had snapped. She surely could have handled the situation better?
Clara was mulling over all this when she opened a drawer and came upon a selection of work tools, including a screwdriver with a wooden handle. Carved into the handle were the initials W.K. Bill Kemp. Bill was usually a nickname for a man called William. Clara had not asked what work Bill Kemp had done before his accident. Now she noted that all the tools in the drawer had the same initials on them. She picked out the screwdriver and headed back to O’Harris.
“Will this do?”
O’Harris took the screwdriver and nodded. He worked it in the lock and depressed the handle carefully, before pressing on the door to take the weight off the lock. He squinted into the keyhole and raised and lowered the head of the screwdriver.
“I can see the latch,” he said. “These old locks, the keyhole is positively enormous. There is a little spring, if I can just…”
There was a click and O’Harris fell forward as the door unlocked and opened. He went to his knees and gave a laugh of surprise.
“Easier than the old cupboard!” He declared.
Clara pushed the door back further and looked into Henry Kemp’s private world. She had not really given thought as to what to expect, but she had never imagined the room would be such a mess. Henry Kemp’s office had been pristine, almost obsessively neat. His bedroom was the opposite.
Dirty clothes had been discarded on the floor. The bed was unmade and the blankets were slipping off the edge while one pillow appeared to have been hurled across the room. Shoes lay where they had been kicked off and books from the spacious book shelf were scattered everywhere. Some were lying open, spine upwards, as if Henry had been in the process of reading them and had become distracted. Loose papers were also everywhere, but mainly in piles on the bed, on a desk in the room, on a chest of drawers, and in several stacks here and there. Perched on top of one, and looking about ready to fall off, was a typewriter, a page still sitting in it with the last lines Henry had typed displayed.
As Clara stepped into the room she noted that everything was thick with dust, except where Henry routinely placed and removed things. The top of the chest of drawers was grey, but there were finger marks in the dust where Henry had apparently grabbed the edge. The rug had not been beaten in ages and was flecked with specks of dirt and crumbs of food. The floor needed a sweep too. Clara could see little balls of fluff and hair that had crept into the corners and gave away that a broom had not entered this room in some time. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling edges and the windows. Clara guessed there were more under the bed and behind the furniture.
Captain O’Harris picked up what was the most obvious feature of the room; he held in his hand a bottle of whisky, empty. There were dozens of bottles all about the room. In one corner they had been precariously stacked into a tower, others were discarded on the floor or were perched on whatever surface was handy. If there had been any doubts about Henry’s drinking habits the bottles swept them away. There was a smell in the room, stale and alcoholic, rather like an ill-kept pub. Henry Kemp’s personal space revealed a man who was rapidly unravelling, who was struggling to keep up the façade of being all right. He was a man in chaos, whose life was faltering out-of-control and the only place he could express his real anguish was in the bedroom he kept locked up.
“Makes you want to open a window,” O’Harris said as he stepped inside. “Here is the real Henry Kemp.”
Clara picked up a shaving kit from the chest of drawers. There were elements of the room where the neat, fastidious Henry emerged. The shaving kit was one of them. Kept in a wooden box, each item had been washed and dried after use and replaced with care. The same could be said about Henry’s clean clothes which were hung up in the wardrobe with precision and military-style order. But, then again, these were the parts of Henry’s world that enabled him to keep up his façade outside his room. He had to keep them tidy.
“Poetry,” O’Harris had picked up one of the books from the floor and was reading the title. “He liked poetry, but the dark, morose stuff.”
He flicked through a few pages.
“Utterly depressing if you ask me,” he closed the book and placed it on the bedside cabinet.
“Cycling magazines,” Clara picked up a magazine with an illustration of a man riding a bicycle speedily down a country lane on the front. “That was his passion.”
“Not his only one,” O’Harris had removed the partially typed sheet of paper from the typewriter. “It seems he was something of an amateur poet himself.”
O’Harris frowned as he read the lines.
“It must be rather New Age stuff, I don’t understand it.”
Clara had picked up a piece of paper from a stack nearest her and discovered the same thing. A series of lines were typed on it, presumably they were meant to be poetry, but they almost struck her as gibberish. She imagined Henry became inspired when he was drinking and the results were these strange contortions of words.
“This one is about the war,” O’Harris said, having started to go through a pile of papers. “At least I think it is. There is stuff about mud and people being blown to pi
eces.”
“Henry served in the war,” Clara nodded. “Perhaps another reason he drank?”
“Certainly that whole bloody affair left its taint on everyone who went through it,” O’Harris said grimly. “Was this Henry Kemp’s way of coping?”
“I don’t think any stretch of the imagination can call this ‘coping’,” Clara glanced about the room at its dust and cobwebs and its many, many empty whisky bottles.
“Oh heavens!”
They both glanced to the door and saw that Ethel Kemp had appeared on the threshold of the room. On seeing the state of the bedroom she had put her hands to her mouth to stifle her shock. Her eyes drifted about the room, taking in each new horror as she came across it. The whisky bottles made her eyes go wide.
“I never imagined…” she looked a little pale and put out a hand to lean on the chest of drawers, at once taking it off again as she felt the soft dust beneath her fingers. “Oh Henry.”
“It is going to take us a while to go through this all,” Clara explained to her.
Ethel was not listening. She had lifted up a whisky bottle and was staring at it like it was some exotic article she had never seen in her life before.
“Henry didn’t drink,” she said to herself.
Clara glanced at O’Harris. He shrugged his shoulders. Ethel Kemp could not be prevented from seeing the revelations of Henry’s true existence now.
“I’ll start with the papers this side of the room, while you do those over there?” He offered.
Clara agreed. With a last glance at Mrs Kemp, who was still examining the whisky bottle in some horror, she set to work, hoping to find something among the poems and scraps of paper that would tell her why Henry Kemp had to die.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The utter disarray of her son’s room had at least given Ethel Kemp something to think about other than his death. She fetched her dusting rags and a broom, along with a mop and bucket, and began the process of giving everything a good clean. It was quite obviously a job she had wanted to do for some time, though she could not have envisaged the state he had allowed the room to get into. She said nothing about the whisky bottles, but collected them up with an expression of distaste, loading them into a large cardboard box she had found.