“You were aware that Mr. Palgrave had written a book—his second book—I believe, sir?” asked the sergeant.
“Yes, of course. A very bright chap, poor Palgrave.”
“We learn that he had various copies made of it.”
“Oh, yes. I’ve got one, a carbon.”
“Was it a gift to you?”
“Not a gift, no. He said he’d like me to read it, so long as I didn’t spill tea on it or get it dogeared. Then I was to keep it somewhere safe until he asked for it in case he needed it to check by, or to send to another publisher.”
“Somewhere safe?”
“Yes. He said the copy he’d sent in could get lost or damaged and the copy he was keeping at his digs—well, there might be a fire or a burglary. He was pretty steamed up about the work. Said it was a major opus and would establish him for all time. Very euphoric, and all that.”
“Have you read your copy, sir?”
“Not yet. Thought I’d get on to it in the Easter holiday. Not much time for reading during term,” said Mr. Winblow, with one eye on his headmaster.
“Do you know what happened to the other copies, sir?”
“Not a clue. Nobody else on the staff here has one, that’s for sure.”
“Thank you, sir. That’s all, then.”
The head nodded dismissal to the assistant master and, when the door had closed behind Winblow, he said:
“Are you satisfied, Sergeant?”
“Oh, yes, sir, thank you. It was a very minor point, but we have to clear these things out of the way.”
“There’s a letter from a Mrs. Kirby,” said the detective-inspector upon his subordinate’s return. “She wants to tell us something which she thinks may have a bearing.”
“Let’s hope it’s something useful, sir. You were right not to make anything important out of the missing copies. Apparently he distributed them among his friends for safe keeping, as I think you said.”
“Well, you’d better get along and see what this woman has to say. Here’s the address. Any time after six, she says.”
“Lives in Chelsea, I notice, sir. Means she may know something.”
“You’re thinking of the river. I thought of it, too.”
“Would a body chucked in the river, perhaps over one of the bridges, fetch up as far as the Bregant Docks, sir? It was opposite them that the body was found. There’s a big bend in the river after Hammersmith.”
“Our river chaps would know about that, I expect, but, if you ask me, Old Father Thames is quite unpredictable. Besides, the fact that this woman lives near the river may be coincidence, so it’s no good raising our hopes too high that she really knows anything important.”
Miranda welcomed the young sergeant with the kindly warmth she extended to all visitors and offered him a drink.
“Not just now, thank you, madam. I understand you have something to tell us which may have a bearing on the case of murder we are investigating.”
“I don’t know whether it’s important, but, in case you didn’t know about it, I thought perhaps I should tell you.”
The sergeant took out his notebook.
“Fire away, madam,” he said encouragingly, so Miranda, aided at times by Adrian, gave a full account of the holiday at Saltacres and the death of young Camilla Hoveton St. John. The sergeant did not interrupt her, but dotted down his shorthand in the hope that something useful might emerge from the long narrative.
“Thank you, madam,” he said when she appeared to have come to an end. “In your opinion, then, Mr. Palgrave’s death could have been a revenge job.”
“I can’t think of any other reason why anybody should have killed him. You see, the more I thought about it—it doesn’t matter telling you this now that he’s dead—and the more we talked it over, my husband and I, the more I was convinced that nobody but Colin could have drowned Camilla.”
“That’s very interesting, madam. Thank you for your help.” He returned to his headquarters and retailed the interview. “I can’t see there’s much in it, sir,” he said. “We had a report on the Saltacres case, of course, but I can’t see any real tie-up. The Saltacres case was never brought in as murder. They are not even certain which day the girl was drowned, and it seems open to doubt whether anybody was with her at the time, anyway.”
“Well, we must still have a shot at finding out where Palgrave went that Friday night. Once we know that, we really can get weaving. Until we know it we are only groping in the dark. If only we could find a motive for his death we might get somewhere, too, but I can’t believe, from your report, that this woman has supplied it. The girl died months and months ago.”
“No, I don’t think she has helped, sir, but it was worth a try.”
“Did you happen to ask her whether she had been lent one of the copies of the novel?”
“No, sir. Judging by what the schoolmaster chap told me, I didn’t think it important. Besides, she only knew Palgrave through this girl picking him up on a holiday beach. I got the impression that she’d (Mrs. Kirby, I mean) that she’d seen very little, if anything, of him once the holiday was over. After all, they live a good way apart and wouldn’t have very much in common, anyway. As you will see when I’ve typed out my report, sir, I asked her point blank if Palgrave had visited her that Friday night. She looked astonished and said he had not. Besides, he’s got a car, sir, and his landlady’s got a garage. It’s quite a way from Finchley to Chelsea. He would have driven to her flat, sir, if he’d gone there at all, not walked.”
“So what about trains and buses? It could be confirmed that he left on foot, but suppose he used public transport? If Mrs. Kirby was lying, and he did go to Chelsea that evening, he may well have preferred a bus rather than take his car across London. Of course we’ve tried that line, but it might be as well to have another go.”
“A chap of Palgrave’s age would have taken his car, sir, and chanced finding somewhere to park at the other end. We know he didn’t take a taxi. We’ve sorted that out. Anyway, the impression I got was that Mrs. Kirby was telling the truth and that she’d seen little or nothing of Palgrave since the holiday.”
“Well, ring her up and find out whether she has a copy of his book. If she has, ask whether he brought it to her himself or sent it by post. Rattle her a bit, if you can. Something might come out. When you’ve done that, we’ll go over my interviews with Palgrave’s agents and publishers. I don’t see any use I can make of what they told me, but perhaps you can make some suggestions.”
Miranda, it transpired, had received a photo copy of Lost Parenthesis by post, together with a request that she would keep it safely and return it if Palgrave asked for it back. She said she had begun to read it when it arrived, thought the early chapters were pretentious and not very interesting and that she had then turned to the last couple of pages and promised herself a full study of the book later on, as Palgrave seemed in no hurry to have her copy back. Asked if she knew where any other copies were likely to have gone, she suggested that one might have been lent to the Lowsons.
“We met them on holiday. Colin was once engaged to Morag,” Miranda said, and gave the sergeant the Lowsons’ new address to which they had moved when they left London soon after the Saltacres holiday.
“Right up there?” said Pinhurst, when he heard where they were living. “Oh, well, that puts them right off the map so far as our enquiry is concerned. I’ll tell you what, though. We’ve got his own carbon copy among his other stuff. I’m going to plough through it again and then you can have a go. You’ll understand why when I tell you about my interviews with Peterheads and Kent and Weald.”
The offices of Peterhead and Peterhead were in a turning off the Strand, and Pinhurst had gone to them before he tackled Kent and Weald. The agents were father and son and it was the younger partner who was interviewed.
He produced the top copy which Palgrave had sent them and also the letter which had accompanied the typescript. In it Palgrave stated that the book had ta
ken longer to write than he had anticipated, but that here it was at last. There was also a copy of the letter they had sent back to him, promising to read the book, to which they had been looking forward, and to let him have their opinion of it if, for any reason (“as it is only your second novel’) they thought it unsuitable for offer to Kent and Weald.
Then there was another letter:
“Please do not proceed with Lost Parenthesis until you hear from me again. Checking the carbon copy, I have come to the conclusion that my description of some of the chief characters may be libellous.”
Pinhurst was intrigued and asked whether, in the agent’s opinion, there was any substance in Palgrave’s fears. He was assured that in the opinion of the agents there was, on the surface, no substance in them at all, unless the author had had some specific persons in mind and, even so, it was very doubtful indeed whether any of the statements in the book were actionable.
“After we had written to him in answer to his letter when he sent us the book, we got his second letter asking us not to send the work to Kent and Weald. We tried to telephone him, but he was at school during our office hours, so we wrote another letter. I suppose that, by the time it was delivered, he was dead. We don’t know what to do about the book now. We are not prepared to ignore what must be regarded as the author’s last wishes, so we are holding on to the script in case he left any posthumous papers which can solve our problem. Possibly his next-of-kin may give us permission to go ahead with the book.”
The prospective publishers had even less to say. They had been rung up by Peterheads with the information that the author wanted to withdraw his book and had been surprised and rather regretful. They had lost money (“as we expect to do on a first book, Detective-Inspector”) but they thought Mr. Palgrave had talent. They had been given the title of his second book and a short synopsis of the plot, both sent in earlier by the author.
“No sense in pursuing any more of these sidelines,” said Pinhurst, “until we’ve found out where he went after he left the school on that Friday afternoon. I detest these chase-ups. Just a lot of dead ends to follow and dead wood to get rid of and, ten to one, no dice in the end. Oh, well, let’s get back to the landlady and that old nosey parker next door, and then we’ll have another go at your Mrs. Kirby. I think she is our best bet, because if there is a tie-up between the death of the St. John girl and Palgrave being given a lethal dose of arsenic, well, she’s the only person, apart from her husband, who seems to have known both parties.”
“There are also the Lowsons, sir.”
“Yes, if they still lived in London, but Mrs. Kirby gave you a Lancashire address.”
“People don’t always stay put in their homes, sir.”
“Oh, well, if we get nothing in these parts, we must have a go at the Lowsons. Didn’t Mrs. Kirby tell you that Lowson is a doctor, though? Doctors don’t gallivant all over the place when they’ve got their own practice. Palgrave was poisoned in London, not in Lancashire.”
“Cherchez la femme, sir? And, according to Mrs. Kirby, Dr. Lowson sold his practice after he lost his father, and is engaged in research.”
CHAPTER 17
A DEAD MAN SPEAKS
“My fancies, fly before ye;
Be ye my fiction—but her story.”
Richard Crashaw
Dame Beatrice read her photocopy of Lost Parenthesis with more concentrated attention than she usually accorded to works of fiction; in fact, by the time she began the third chapter she was inclined to think that here was part of an autobiography rather than a slightly over-written piece of purely imaginative prose.
This impression was heightened by the fact that the narrative was told in the first person singular and that the writer, somewhat irritatingly, took himself very seriously indeed.
Not risking a disclosure of his true profession, Palgrave had described himself as a young interne and, although parts of the story appeared to have been plagiarised (whether the author realised it or not) from other and better writers, there was no doubt that he had done his homework by consulting non-fictional works on medicine, the law and morbid psychology.
The theme of the book was blackmail. The hero had found himself involved with a woman patient described as a few years older than he. He had yielded to her charms to the extent of providing her with a baby whom, at her instigation, he had subsequently murdered.
On the strength of this (Dame Beatrice thought) unlikely episode, since to procure an abortion for the woman in these conscienceless days would have been a simpler and far less dangerous proposition that the calculated infanticide of a being already delivered from the womb, the mother blackmailed the young medico, bleeding him so mercilessly that he had seen fit to drown her.
This had happened on holiday and here the author had taken further risks. Under fabricated names, Saltacres and Stack Ferry were well, although over elaborately, described, and the characters, to anybody who knew the originals, were all too plainly not only Palgrave himself, but his acquaintances, including Miranda, Adrian, Morag and the dead Camilla.
The latter, indeed, appeared in several rôles, or so it seemed to the percipient reader. She was both the predatory blackmailer and the hoydenish teenager. She also appeared to be a kind of Siamese twin of the apparently idolised (by the author) heroine, whom the first-person hero ended by marrying.
Incidents which Dame Beatrice knew of only by hearsay, such as the misappropriated car, the moonlight bathes, the bohemian set-up at the Saltacres cottage and the coincidental arrival at the cottage of Morag and Cupar Lowson (here renamed Nancy and Shaun McBride) would mean little, she thought, to readers who had never taken a peep behind the scenes, but might act like dynamite on anybody who had the facts which lay behind the incidents described in the book.
On the other hand, the descriptions of the various characters and the actions and motives attributed to each were so mixed and mingled and, in the reader’s view, often so impulsive and contradictory, that it was unlikely that any one person would have been able to identify herself or himself as a personage portrayed in the book.
“No truth, no libel, I imagine,” said Dame Beatrice, handing the script to Laura. “See what you make of it. Knowing as much as I do, and a good deal more which I surmise, I do not feel that I have brought an open mind to my perusal of this work. You, I trust, will do better.”
“Doubtful,” said Laura. “By this time I expect you’ve told me much of what you’ve found out, and you know what my mind is like—it is apt to fill in gaps. Is the book, as a book, worth reading?”
“There, again, I can hardly tell. It is the book of an inexperienced author, but the story might interest some people and it is well, if somewhat elaborately, written.”
“But you wouldn’t put it on your library list?”
“As a contribution to my study of morbid psychology, perhaps I would.”
Laura took a couple of evenings to read the script. When she returned it, she said:
“Could be hot stuff if you equated yourself with one or two of the characters, I suppose. That’s if you could get yourself disentangled from the various ladies involved. Naturally I’ve tried to sort out Camilla St. John from Miranda Kirby from Morag Lowson from any of Camilla’s girlfriends, but it can’t be done, and the same goes for Palgrave himself, Adrian Kirby, Lowson, and the various medicos who, I suppose, are composite portraits of the schoolmasters Palgrave knew. Quite the nastiest bit of work seems to be Palgrave himself, as the book is written in the first person. In any case, the plot is wildly improbable.”
“It can’t be, you know,” said Dame Beatrice, “if somebody thought it so probable that he or she went to the length of poisoning the author. I think I will show the book to Ferdinand.”
“A man—the only one—who really terrifies me. If ever I am had up for serious crime, I pray I don’t come up against him.”
“Oh, he is usually defending. He says it is far more fun than prosecuting and a great deal more
difficult, too, because the prisoner usually has done it and to convince a jury that he has not, is a task of some magnitude.”
Sir Ferdinand read the book and asked what he was supposed to do about it.
“Could it lead to the murder of the author?” his mother enquired.
“Only by the critics. Is this the arsenic victim?”
“Yes, indeed. It is all mixed up with that other case in which I was involved, the death by drowning at Saltacres.”
“As I see it, the main theme of the story is blackmail. The death of the girl seems to have been incidental to the main plot.”
“Yes, but, by inference, the hero drowned her.”
“On the assumption that, as has been so glibly and yet somewhat truly said, each man kills the thing he loves. How much, and to what an unfathomable extent, writers are the products of the age into which they are born! Kipling would have been twice as good had he lived at the present day; Shakespeare less than a quarter as great, had he come on earth a century or so later than he did.” He cocked an eye at Laura, but she refused to be drawn into contention.
“So you see no reason why Palgrave should have been murdered?” said Dame Beatrice.
“Oh, yes, I do. Somebody saw something in the story which threatened him.”
“Him?”
“Or her, but as the book is written in the first person by a man and, very obviously, from a man’s point of view, I am inclined to think that ‘him’ is the operative word. The book, in fact, may well be Palgrave’s confession, and his death, in spite of what the police think, may have been an expiatory suicide.”
“I might agree, if he had not also been responsible for trying to get the book suppressed. That seems to me extraordinary in the face of his letter to me.”
“Somebody who, like you, has read the script, may be his murderer, then.”
“And that would include me, as I first saw the book before Palgrave died. He wanted me to give it my blessing, as I think I told you. But I am still at a loss. His letter which accompanied the script hardly seems to me to contain a request that an author who wanted to suppress his book would make.”
The Mudflats of the Dead (Mrs. Bradley) Page 18