Murder by Numbers

by Eric Brown

  Only three rooms on the ground floor had been maintained. One was the sitting room where the guests had gathered the previous night; another was the library where the shooting had occurred, and the third was a small room next door to the library.

  ‘And what do we have here?’ Ralph declared as he opened the third door.

  This room had evidently served as a bedroom – and the bedroom of an invalid. An adjustable hospital bed stood against the far wall, and an oxygen cylinder was propped next to it, attached to a breathing mask.

  Ralph approached the bed and knelt down, picking up an empty cardboard packet. ‘Drugs. Chlormethine.’

  ‘Apparently, Fenton was suffering from some kind of cancer.’

  Ralph nodded, looking around the room. ‘Bedpans, empty syringes, medicine bottles. He was nursed here. We need to check nursing agencies, talk to whoever looked after him.’

  Langham crossed to a Queen Anne bureau in the corner of the room and pushed the roll-up lid. Something scurried from a nest of papers and leapt to the carpet, startling him – a huge grey house mouse, disgruntled at having its habitation invaded.

  Gingerly, he sorted through those papers not shredded into nesting material, and at the back of the bureau discovered a sheaf of bank statements.

  He leafed through them one by one.

  ‘Take a look,’ he said, passing them to Ralph. ‘Notice anything interesting?’

  ‘The cash deposits paid in on the second of every month, always for the same amount.’

  ‘Twenty-five quid going back’ – Langham thumbed through the statements – ‘going back almost five years.’

  ‘So Fenton was paid twenty-five quid in cash as regular as clockwork.’ Ralph scanned the statements. ‘That was aside from his pension. That’s all he had coming in.’

  ‘Which might account for the state of this place.’

  Langham rooted amongst the papers and found the stubs of three cheque books going back almost a decade. He sat on the bed and went through the dockets meticulously.

  ‘Find anything?’ Ralph asked.

  ‘No, nothing. Wait a sec.’

  In the most recent book, a cheque had been written without the stub being filled in. Langham tilted the book to the light and made out the impression of handwriting on the uppermost cheque. He read aloud: ‘Thirty guineas, paid to the Kersh and Cohen Theatrical Agency, two weeks ago.’

  ‘What the blazes did he want from a theatrical agency?’

  ‘Search me,’ Langham said. ‘Hired a troupe to entertain him in his old age?’

  ‘I’ll look them up tomorrow,’ Ralph said, ‘along with butlering agencies. Hang on. What if this butler chappie was nothing of the sort, but an actor hired to play the part?’

  Langham frowned. ‘Why was the butler necessarily an actor? If he was in on all this, and an accessory to murder, then he’s unlikely to be someone Fenton hired to play a part, is he?’

  ‘Right,’ Ralph said. ‘But I’d still like to know why Fenton shelled out thirty guineas to this theatrical outfit.’

  Langham sorted through the rest of the bureau but found nothing of interest. They left the bedroom and searched the rest of the ground floor before moving upstairs. Here, again, the rooms were for the most part unused and in many cases derelict. Langham opened the door to one bedroom to be met by a cold wind blowing in through the smashed casement. Ivy had invaded the room and coated the entirety of the far wall, and swallows had made their distinctive cupolaed nests in the cornices.

  The neighbouring bedroom had evidently been used recently, judging by the made-up double bed and a pile of clothes on a chest beneath the window. Langham sorted through them: trousers and shirts that would fit a smallish man. They went through drawers, cupboards and the chest, but found nothing of further interest.

  They moved on, finding more empty, unused rooms in varying states of dereliction, until Langham opened the very last door on the corridor.

  ‘Another one,’ he said, and led the way into the room.

  The only item of significance here, other than the made-up bed, was a small table and mirror positioned against the wall. Langham found an array of cosmetics in the drawer and what looked like a tube of greasepaint.

  ‘What do you make of these?’

  Ralph frowned, fingering the tube. ‘Maybe he hired an actor who used this room?’

  ‘Possibly. The recently occupied bedrooms tie in with the theory that Fenton hired two people to carry out his dirty work after his death. They came here to receive instructions.’

  Ralph sat down on the bed. ‘What I don’t get, Don, is why they’d agree to do that? Was he paying them hundreds?’ He gestured. ‘Going by the state of this place, he didn’t have that much cash to flash around. OK, so did he have some kind of hold over these people, enough to force them to kill, after his death? But that wouldn’t work – if they were coerced into killing, surely when the geezer topped himself, they’d simply say, “Sod this for a lark”.’

  ‘My guess is that they weren’t forced into doing this,’ Langham said. ‘They’re doing it of their own volition, because they want to. So who the hell are they, and what’s their motive?’

  Ralph laughed. ‘Work that out, Don, and we’re laughing.’

  ‘Seen enough? I want to get back and make sure Maria’s safe and well.’

  They left the house, drove through the village and turned on to the London road.

  NINE

  Maria left the office and caught a bus to Earl’s Court. She sat on the top deck, at the very front, and stared out at the rain as the bus made its laborious stop-start way through the grey streets of the capital.

  She wished, now, that she’d pressed Donald to tell her the reason he wanted her to book into a hotel. He was at Lower Malton, for some reason, and she wondered if he’d found something at Winterfield that made him fear for her safety.

  She recalled Maxwell Fenton’s threats. But Fenton was dead, and the dead could not harm the living, could they? Not harm them physically, that is: she remembered what Donald had said about the artist’s wanting to instil guilt into his guests. So why, then, had he insisted that she book into a hotel?

  Far better, she thought, to take up Pamela’s invitation to stay at her place. She would have company the next morning, as Pamela had said that she didn’t intend to go into the agency.

  She stepped from the bus at Earl’s Court and crossed the road, hurrying through the rain past the Lyons’ tearoom. She climbed the steps to the Ryland and Langham Detective Agency, smiling to herself at the gold lettering on the glass door-panel. Donald had been inordinately proud of the legend when he’d showed it off to her a couple of months ago, and told her that Ralph had had it done on the cheap by a friend. It showed, she thought; the first ‘t’ in Detective was peeling. She had refrained from telling Donald that it made the word look more like ‘Defective’.

  Pamela was slipping the cover over her Remington upright when Maria entered the outer office.

  ‘All set,’ the girl said. ‘You didn’t mind cancelling the hotel booking? Only, it’ll be nice to have people around the place.’

  ‘Not at all; I’d rather stay with you. As you say, why go to the expense of paying for a room?’

  Pamela hesitated in the process of pulling on her coat. ‘Did Donald tell you what it’s all about?’

  As Pamela locked the office door, Maria said, ‘He said he’d tell me later. But he thought it a good idea that we stay with you.’

  They waited five minutes at the bus stop across the road from the agency, then caught the number eighty-eight across the river to Bermondsey. The bus carried them through a city thronged with pedestrians but noticeably free of traffic. The petrol rationing was having its effect.

  At one point, Pamela asked, ‘Have you thought any more about telling Donald?’ She raised her pencilled eyebrows.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about nothing else all afternoon. I know I should tell him, and I will. But I need to find the right mome
nt to do so.’

  She turned and stared through the rain-splattered window.

  They alighted at Bermondsey High Street, and Pamela led the way past the illuminated shop fronts and turned left along a street of tiny red-brick terrace houses. Another left turn brought them into an identical street, this one adorned with sycamore trees planted at regular intervals along the pavement.

  Pamela pushed open the gate of a mid-terrace house and unlocked the front door.

  What immediately struck Maria was how tiny the place was compared with her own spacious Kensington apartment, and then how tasteful the decorations in the front room were: green-and-white striped wallpaper, a beige carpet, and a jade-green three-piece suite.

  When she admired the room, Pamela said, ‘All thanks to the agency, Maria. I couldn’t have afforded to redecorate on the wages I was getting at the gallery.’

  Maria looked around the room, noticing the Baird radiogram in the corner. ‘Do you rent?’

  ‘It was my mum and dad’s,’ Pamela explained as she moved into the adjacent kitchen and put the kettle on. ‘They left me the house when they passed away last year.’

  She leaned against the doorframe, tea caddy in hand, and smiled at Maria. ‘It’s OK. They’d both been ill for some time. It was a release in the end. Milk and sugar?’

  ‘Milk, no sugar.’

  They sat side by side on the two-seater sofa and sipped their tea from oversized mugs.

  Maria said, ‘Donald and I won’t be in the way, when you and Nigel …?’

  ‘I only see him every Saturday,’ Pamela said, ‘and sometimes on a Friday night. He’s out the rest of the time with his mates. It’s either the pub, football or the dogs – I hardly get a look in. Tonight it’s the greyhounds at White City.’

  Maria recalled what Pamela had told her over lunch about Nigel’s wish to marry her. The girl had made it obvious that there was nothing further from her mind.

  She thought back to when she was Pamela’s age, and her life then: a poorly paid job in publishing, few friends, and chronic suspicion when it came to men.

  Pamela said, ‘Still thinking about what to tell Donald?’

  Maria smiled. ‘Oh, it’s not that,’ she said. ‘I was considering Fenton. Donald thinks what he did last night might have been intended to inspire guilt in the guests – but Fenton made me feel guilty even when he was alive, after what happened at Winterfield back in the thirties.’

  ‘You were very young,’ Pamela began.

  ‘The awful thing is that what he did … It made me feel as if it were my fault. I felt guilty for striking him, and yet guilty for giving myself to him as I did. Afterwards I knew he’d manipulated me, preyed on my naivety – but that made me feel even more guilty for the fool I’d been. I was very mixed up for years, and it was a long time before I learned that I wasn’t to blame, and that Fenton was responsible for what happened.’

  She shook her head, thinking back to the grim, lonely war years working as a secretary in London.

  ‘It made me very suspicious of men, Pamela. I thought they were all like Fenton – out for themselves. I had a few brief, unsuccessful relationships, but I could never commit myself, and it was me who always broke it off. I didn’t want to be hurt again, like the first time.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Maria,’ Pamela said, taking her hand.

  Maria laughed. ‘In my early thirties I’d resigned myself to spinsterhood! Imagine that.’

  ‘And then Donald came along.’

  ‘I suppose I got to know him, to trust him, over the long period when he couldn’t bring himself to ask me to dinner. Charles spoke so much about him, said what a “fine fellow” he was, that I felt I knew him even before we got together.’

  Pamela squeezed her hand. ‘So, you see, Fenton hasn’t had the last word.’

  ‘And yet even now, after all those years, and after his death … I hate him for coming between Donald and me, and for how I feel now – guilty and afraid of what Donald might say. I’m being foolish, aren’t I?’ She smiled and jumped up. ‘But enough of all that. I’m going to make another pot of tea.’

  At six o’clock they peeled potatoes and carrots, and Pamela turned on the cooker and took three Cornish pasties from the larder. As the vegetables boiled, they drank their tea, and Maria asked Pamela about her work at the detective agency.

  ‘You do realize, don’t you, that if you get promoted, the jobs they’ll give you will be boring and routine? It isn’t every day they investigate anything of interest. Mainly, it’s petty thefts and errant husbands.’

  ‘I know – I type up the notes, remember? But anything would be better than sitting behind a desk all day. I’d like to get out of the office from time to time.’ She leaned back against the cooker, warming herself. ‘But Donald likes the job, doesn’t he?’

  Maria frowned. ‘I’m not at all sure that he does,’ she said. ‘He’s always complaining that it takes him from his writing. I think he started work at the agency as a favour to Ralph, though he thought it might help with his writing.’

  ‘You don’t think he’d leave, do you?’

  Maria smiled at her. ‘Between you and me, when we move to Suffolk, I intend to ask him if he’d think about cutting down his working hours.’

  ‘What do you think he’ll say?’

  ‘I think he’ll be agreeable. More time to write, after all.’

  ‘And Ralph?’

  ‘He would, as the saying goes, take it on the chin. He’d have to.’

  At six thirty a loud knocking at the door heralded Donald’s arrival. Maria let him in, and he stepped into the front room and looked around. ‘What a nice place you’ve got yourself, Pam.’

  He pulled off his overcoat and tossed his hat on the sofa.

  Maria smiled as she watched Donald make polite small talk with Pamela, complimenting her taste in paintings. They were Constable and Turner copies, which Pamela said had belonged to her parents and which she couldn’t bring herself to discard.

  Donald looked tired, and normally he would have slumped in an armchair, pulled Maria on to his knee and told her all about his day.

  He did at last drop into a chair and stretch out his legs towards the two-bar electric fire as Pamela passed him a mug of black tea.

  Maria sat on the arm of the chair, took his chin and directed his face towards her. ‘And now, please, tell me what is happening, oui?’

  He grimaced, pointed to the corner of the room where Pamela was setting the Formica-topped table and said, ‘Over dinner, non?’

  Maria ate with little appetite as Donald told them about Dr Bryce’s death.

  ‘The killer made it look like suicide, but Jeff’s men are certain it was murder.’

  Maria swallowed a tasteless wedge of Cornish pasty. ‘He threatened us,’ she said in almost a whisper. ‘Fenton threatened us all. It can’t be a coincidence, can it?’

  ‘Jeff’s working on the theory that someone’s carrying out Fenton’s last wishes, for whatever reason. Maybe two people. A woman was seen leaving Bryce’s place in the early hours. And Jeff’s keen to trace the butler.’

  Maria shook her head, her mind racing. ‘But he threatened us all. You think we’re all in danger, which is why—’

  Donald reached out and took her hand. ‘A precaution,’ he said. ‘That’s all. A precaution, until we get to the bottom of this.’

  Later that night, in bed in the tiny second bedroom, they lay awake in the moonlight that shone through the thin cotton curtains. For the past fifteen minutes Maria had thought of nothing else but her lies to Donald about her affair with Maxwell Fenton.

  He stroked her cheek. ‘Maria, everything’s going to be fine.’

  She turned to face him and kissed his lips. ‘I know it is, mon cheri,’ she said.

  TEN

  The following morning Langham drove from Bermondsey to Pimlico and hurried up the steps to the Charles Elder Literary Agency. Molly beamed at him from behind the reception desk.

  ‘His ni
bs in?’ he asked.

  She pointed to the office door, and he crossed to it and knocked.

  ‘Enter,’ came the baritone summons.

  Langham stepped into the sumptuous room. Charles Elder sat behind his vast mahogany desk, his snowy white hair piled above his big, triple-chinned face.

  ‘My boy, how wonderful to see you on this bleak and blustery morn. You bring a ray of sunshine to the day!’ He frowned. ‘But this isn’t about Maria, is it? She did depart rather hastily yesterday. She is well, Donald?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Langham said, taking a seat. ‘But this is the situation …’ And he proceeded to tell Charles about Maria’s invitation to Winterfield, Maxwell Fenton’s suicide and the murder of Dr Bryce.

  ‘But that’s terrible, my boy! Appalling! And are you sure that Maria is safe in Bermondsey?’

  ‘As safe as houses,’ he said. ‘But I think it wise if she doesn’t come into the office until we’ve got to the bottom of this.’

  ‘Of course, of course. As long as it takes …’ The big man looked worried, cupping his multiple chins with his be-ringed right hand.

  ‘I’ve come to collect a couple of manuscripts she was working on—’

  ‘But there’s absolutely no need, Donald! Maria shouldn’t be working, what with everything else she has to worry about.’

  ‘She insisted,’ Langham said. ‘I think it’ll help to take her mind off the situation.’

  ‘But this is terrible, terrible,’ Charles wailed. ‘I do think it calls for a little drink.’ And so saying, he pulled a bottle of whiskey from his desk and poured himself a peg. ‘You will join me, my boy?’

  ‘Bit early for me, Charles. I need to keep a clear head.’

  ‘Here’s to your investigations,’ Charles said, hoisting his glass and accounting for the measure in a single gulp.

  He locked the bottle away and stared across the desk at Langham. ‘I have been thinking, my boy. And this latest development only serves to confirm my convictions.’

  ‘About?’