Murder by Numbers

by Eric Brown

  She shook her head, stricken.

  ‘The officers entered the house when we got here,’ she went on. ‘The front door was wide open. I followed, but one of the officers shouted at me to stay where I was.’ She smiled at him through her tears. ‘But I wasn’t going to do that, was I? So I followed him in and … and in the front room … Oh, it was horrible! Poor, poor Holly …’

  She broke down again.

  He murmured comforting words that he knew to be no more than futile platitudes.

  Ralph climbed from the back of his car and approached, nodding to Langham and touching Maria’s elbow.

  ‘I could take Maria and Pam to the guest house, Don,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Langham said, surprising himself. ‘I’ve got a better idea. Call me paranoid, but I wouldn’t put it past Fenton or the woman to follow you. Wait here a sec.’

  He crossed to where Mallory was conferring with a forensics officer, cleared his idea with the detective, and returned to Ralph and Maria. He called over one of the officers assigned to protect the women and said, ‘Detective Inspector Mallory’s okayed this: you’re to take my wife and Pamela out to Suffolk. The Grange Hotel, Abbotsford. There’ll be plenty of empty rooms at this time of year. You’ll stay there until told otherwise. Any expenses above and beyond what you can claim from the force, I’ll cover. Understood?’

  The officer nodded. ‘I’ll need to have a word with the boss,’ he said, nodding towards Mallory.

  ‘Off you go.’

  He squeezed Maria’s shoulder. ‘You’ll be safe in the country, and I’ll phone you.’

  The officer returned. ‘All set. I’ll ring through to the Grange and book a couple of rooms. Don’t worry yourself, sir,’ he said to Langham. ‘They’ll be in safe hands.’

  The officer returned to the car, informed his driver, then spoke to Pamela.

  Langham wiped a tear from Maria’s cheek. ‘This is for the best. I couldn’t bear the thought of your remaining in London.’

  ‘You take care, Donald. No heroics, do you hear me?’

  He smiled. ‘No heroics,’ he promised.

  Pamela moved from Ralph’s car to the squad car, and Maria slipped into the back beside her. Langham lifted a hand in a forlorn wave as the car started up and made its way beneath the tape obligingly lifted by a constable.

  He pointed to the house and said to Ralph, ‘I’ll have a quick word with Jeff. Have you been inside?’

  Ralph grimaced. ‘Poor kid didn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘Don’t wait, Ralph. I’ll take the Tube home.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I’ll drive you, and I won’t take no for an answer. I’ll be in the car.’

  Langham crossed the road and joined Mallory at the gate. He waited until the detective had finished speaking to the forensics man, then asked, ‘How the hell did this happen, Jeff?’

  Mallory pointed to the back of the ambulance. In its lighted interior, Langham made out two plainclothes men being attended to by a pair of medics. The officers appeared punch-drunk.

  ‘Fenton knocked them out?’

  ‘Chloroform,’ Mallory said. ‘He – or his accomplice – obviously had the place under surveillance. When one of the men went into the house to use the bathroom, the chap in the car was approached by someone who tapped on the window. No sooner had the officer wound it down than he had a face full of chloroform. Out like a light. Then the killer stationed himself beside the door, and when the first officer came back out, he jumped him.’

  ‘Was either of the men able to describe the assailant?’

  Mallory shook his head. ‘Hardly saw a thing. Just an arm and a chloroform pad.’

  ‘Then the bastard went inside and …’

  ‘Beckwith heard the scuffle when second officer was attacked. She had the nous to lock the door, run back to the sitting room and phone the police.’

  ‘How did Fenton get in?’

  Mallory indicated the front door, where a stained-glass window panel was missing. ‘Simply smashed the glass and unfastened the Yale.’

  He gestured for Langham to follow him up the garden path, and they crunched over the broken glass and entered the house.

  A long corridor terminated in a kitchen at the back of the house. Halfway down, to the left, was a door leading to a sitting room. From this, periodically, came the blue-white illumination of the police photographer’s camera flash. Mallory indicated that they should wait until the photographer had finished. He leaned against the banisters and lit a cigarette.

  Langham said, ‘Beckwith was staying with someone—’

  ‘That’s right. Her friend was out for the night, visiting her parents. She got back about fifteen minutes ago.’ He thumbed towards the road. ‘She’s in one of the cars, being consoled.’

  Langham swore.

  ‘We’re having a job keeping this from getting out, Don. The press are sniffing around. The Super hit the bloody roof when I phoned him about Beckwith just now. It looks bad – crazed killers on the loose and innocents being slaughtered one by one. Christ, the hacks would have a field day.’

  ‘Have you considered the possibility that it might be better out in the open?’ Langham said. ‘Then at least the public could be alerted to be on the lookout for Fenton and the redhead.’

  ‘I discussed it with the Super last night,’ Mallory said. ‘He weighed the benefit of the public knowing who to look out for against the panic it might cause. He thought it wise to keep schtum. He called in a few editors today, explained the situation in the strictest confidence and promised them the full story when we nabbed the killers.’

  The photographer emerged from the sitting room, grim-faced, and edged down the hallway. He was followed by a forensics officer who paused to report to Mallory. ‘Multiple stab wounds to the chest and stomach. Surgeon says she died within minutes of the first incision. I’ll give her this: she didn’t give in without a fight.’

  ‘Dabs?’

  ‘Nothing. We’ve finished here – I’ll have a report on your desk first thing.’

  ‘The killer? If she fought …’

  The officer said, ‘He’ll be covered in blood, that’s for sure. No way of telling if she managed to inflict injuries. Her nails are clean, so she didn’t scratch him.’

  ‘What a sodding mess,’ Mallory swore.

  The officer nodded towards the front door. ‘How are …?’

  Mallory grunted. ‘Abbott and Costello? Woozy with the chloroform. They’ll live.’

  ‘Go easy on them, boss.’

  ‘Go easy? They were slack at best, incompetent at worst. Chap in the car should’ve been alert to someone coming up and tapping on the window – especially when his partner had nipped to the ruddy loo. And because of their incompetence …’

  The officer made no comment and moved off down the hall.

  Mallory gestured to the sitting room. ‘Shall we?’

  The state of the room testified to the officer’s claim that Holly Beckwith had not died without a fight. A small table and a couple of easy chairs were overturned. A broken vase and a smashed glass ashtray suggested she’d used them as missiles. A rug was rucked up, a magazine rack tipped over and its contents spilled across the carpet.

  Holly Beckwith was curled up in a corner at the back of the room, her stockinged legs folded beneath her. She wore a floral-print dress, the material of its fitted bodice saturated with blood. Her head rested against the wall, her eyes open and staring, her arms covering her stomach as if in a futile attempt to protect herself. The expression on her face was oddly peaceful, wholly at odds with the circumstances of her final seconds.

  Langham took one look, then walked over to a sofa beside the window and sat down. He leaned forward and rubbed his tired eyes.

  Mallory joined him and slumped into an armchair. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

  ‘We’re going through the phone books in search of Prudence F. We need to find out everything we can about Fenton’s friends and acquaintances – see if an
yone knows anything about the redhead.’

  ‘I have my team looking into that.’

  Langham massaged his tired eyes. ‘At some point I should talk to Crispin Proudfoot. He might have some idea about the people the artist knew five years ago. Will you inform the people you have protecting him that we’ll be around?’

  ‘Will do,’ Mallory said. ‘Christ, I’m tired. Up at five this morning, and I’ve yet to talk to the chumps who were detailed to stop this happening.’

  ‘Haul them over the coals?’

  Mallory shook his head. ‘No, I’ll have them roasted in hell. Except … that might’ve been me out there, Don. They’ll be feeling bad enough. One lapse, and an innocent woman dies. It’ll be on their consciences for a long time, so I suppose that’s punishment enough.’

  Langham climbed to his feet. ‘I’ll leave you to it, Jeff. I’ll be in touch if we come up with anything.’

  He left the house and crossed to Ralph’s car. ‘I’m dead beat, Ralph. It’s been a long day.’

  Ralph drove under the police cordon and along the quiet street.

  They continued in silence for a while, and at last Ralph swore. Langham glanced across at him.

  ‘Just thinking about yesterday,’ Ralph said. ‘Holly was lovely, wasn’t she? A real beauty. I finished her cake.’

  Langham nodded, feeling his throat constrict at the odd naivety of his friend’s non sequitur.

  They talked back and forth for the next ten minutes, moving on from the case and discussing football, politics, the petrol shortage. At one point Langham found himself asking, ‘Remember Madagascar, Ralph?’

  ‘As if it was yesterday.’

  ‘Remember just after the skirmish at Diego Suarez, where we lost Macgregor? We ransacked that bar and got potted.’

  Ralph laughed. ‘Hell, that stuff was rotgut. My head the next day …’

  ‘I remember sitting with you when the sun came up. We were still drinking, trying to make sense of a good man’s death.’ He shrugged to himself. ‘I feel a bit like that now, Ralph. None of this makes much sense.’

  They pulled up outside Langham’s Kensington apartment. ‘Fancy a nightcap?’

  ‘Better not. Annie’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

  ‘See you in the morning, then.’

  Ralph saluted. ‘So long, Cap’n.’

  Langham let himself into the flat. Instead of going straight to bed, he sat in the lounge under the orange glow of the standard lamp and reached for the telephone, then stopped. He wanted to talk to Maria, but she wouldn’t yet have arrived at the hotel. He looked at his watch. It was just after eleven.

  He sat back and considered the events of the day.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Langham spent a restless night and woke from confused dreams at seven the following morning. He drew himself a hot bath, shaved, then toasted a couple of slices of white bread, spreading them thickly with butter and Marmite.

  It was the first time for months that he’d sat at the breakfast table without Maria. He missed her conversation, their inconsequential chatter about what they would do that day, about the thriller he was working on and the manuscripts Maria was reading for the agency.

  At eight he took a bus to Earl’s Court. A thick fog had descended during the night, reducing visibility to twenty yards. Figures appeared suddenly through the gloom like ghosts. The grey pall that hung over the city matched his mood.

  He saw that Ralph had arrived before him: his Morris Minor was parked outside the Lyons’ tearoom. Langham climbed the stairs to the first-floor office and found Ralph seated behind Pamela’s desk, pen in hand, going through a phone book. He looked up as Langham entered.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep. Got in at seven.’

  ‘Tea?’ Langham filled the kettle and spooned three heaps into the stained teapot.

  A few minutes later, he passed Ralph his chipped mug and sat on the corner of the desk.

  ‘I’m jiggered,’ Ralph said, taking a deep draft. He indicated a handwritten list of telephone numbers. ‘Over fifty numbers – and what’s the chances of coming up trumps? Like I said yesterday, Prudence F. might’ve married and changed her name.’

  Ralph had extended his search from the London phone books to those covering Essex and Suffolk. Langham nodded to the piled directories. ‘What’s your logic?’

  ‘Most of Fenton’s acquaintances in the thirties were from London, Essex or thereabouts, so that’s where I’m concentrating the search.’ He passed Langham the list of telephone numbers. ‘You might as well start here.’

  Langham moved to the inner office, sat back in his chair and lodged his feet on the desk with the telephone in his lap.

  For the next hour he worked his way down the list, scoring a thick line through each number as he drew a blank. He fell into a monotonous routine: ‘Donald Langham speaking, of the Ryland and Langham Detective Agency. I’m awfully sorry to bother you, but I’m attempting to trace acquaintances of the artist Maxwell Fenton.’

  When he did manage to get through, answers varied from ‘Never heard of Maxwell Fenton’ to ‘Now, why would you be trying to trace these people, young man?’ He was either given short shrift from people rushing to get to work or subjected to inconsequential chatter from lonely individuals with time on their hands.

  It was a slow, painstaking process, and he couldn’t shake the conviction that he was chasing the proverbial wild goose.

  At nine thirty, with more than twenty numbers crossed off the list, he cradled the receiver and joined Ralph. ‘This is flogging a dead horse.’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  He moved to the window and stared out. He remembered speaking on the phone the day before to Constance Merriman, and his suspicions regarding Maria and Fenton … He recalled the portrait of her he’d seen at Winterfield, and the look in her eyes. It was the same expression that Maxwell Fenton had captured in his portrait of the younger Hermione Goudge, when they had been lovers.

  He moved suddenly from the window, reversed a chair before the desk and sat down.

  ‘What is it?’ Ralph said, staring at Langham.

  ‘Something that occurred to me yesterday, while I was quizzing those women about Fenton and the possibility that he’d fathered a child.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘The photo of the guests outside Winterfield.’ He hesitated. ‘The way Fenton had his hand on Maria’s shoulder … What if Maria wasn’t telling the truth?’

  Ralph lowered his chipped mug. ‘You mean about her and Fenton?’

  ‘What if she did have a fling with him – at her age?’

  ‘What did she say about it?’

  Langham shrugged. ‘She said they met a few times and Fenton painted her. She said she was flattered, a little in awe.’

  ‘Did you ask her straight out if they’d …?’

  ‘Not straight out. But while I was talking to Merriman, it struck me: what if they had had an affair, and what if Maria had had a child by Fenton? That’d be reason enough for her not having told me anything.’

  Ralph swore. ‘But you don’t think she did have a kid?’

  ‘No … But that doesn’t mean they weren’t lovers. And if she hasn’t been honest with me …’ The idea made him feel sick.

  Ralph shrugged. ‘How old was she back then?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘A kid,’ Ralph said. ‘As you said, she was dazzled by Fenton showing her so much attention. And so what if she did have an affair and now regrets it? It’s understandable that she doesn’t want to hurt you by raking it up.’

  ‘Yes, but her not telling me would be somehow even more hurtful.’

  Ralph looked thoughtful. At last, he said, ‘If I were you, Don, I’d ask her. She loves you. She’ll understand how you feel about it.’

  ‘But if she did have a fling with him …’ he said, trying to work out just how he would feel about it. Jealous, over an affair that had happened before the war when she was no more than a girl? He had to admit t
hat, shallow though it might be, he would feel jealous.

  Ralph said, ‘I’ll tell you something, Don. This happened donkey’s years ago, back in the early thirties. Me and Annie, we’d been going steady for a couple of years. We were young, both in our late teens. I was head over heels, and I think she was with me. Well, now I know she was. Anyway, we had a tiff. More than that – a real, full-blown bust-up. And you know what’s daft? I can’t even remember what it was all about. I do remember I walked out and said I never wanted to see her again. So weeks passed and I felt sick – you know that feeling in the gut when you miss the girl you love something shocking, and you know you’ve been a bloody fool? And then I started hearing rumours she was seeing some other bloke – a little git from down Barking way, and boy was I sick!’ He smiled at the recollection, sipped his tea and went on, ‘To cut a long story short, we got back together and I was as happy as Larry. Annie swore she hadn’t seen this lad from Barking, and we got wed six months later.’

  ‘Where’s all this leading?’ Langham asked, smiling.

  ‘I’m getting there, Don. So a couple of years down the line … I don’t know how it came up, but Annie wanted to tell me something, but couldn’t bring herself to. So I ask her straight out what was bothering her. And she says, “You know that time we split up, Ralph, and I said I hadn’t had a fling with this other bloke? Well, I did – but I swear it wasn’t anything serious. Just a rebound thing.”’ Ralph shrugged again. ‘Can’t say I wasn’t cut up about it, but I thought, well, I can get all shirty about it and take the high ground, or I can grin and bear it and take it like a man. It was water under the bridge, and we loved each other, so why let myself get all het up about something that happened years ago?’

  ‘So you’re telling me to ask Maria, and take it on the chin if she admits to having an affair, right?’