The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  “We don’t know for certain,” Rebecca put in, “that there wasn’t a suit missing, and underclothes.”

  “He must have had a brainstorm,” Harold said. “That’s the only thing that would account for it.”

  “Yes, but the clothes, the overcoat——” began Walter.

  “The body was naked. But they could easily have been ripped off by the ship’s propeller and shredded. Or they may yet be found.” Nigel paused, and began to prowl along the length of the three windows. “How he got into the water, we simply don’t know. But he was certainly dead by then—the autopsy proves it. You agree?”

  “Yes. No doubt at all,” said James, with a worried frown.

  Nigel paused again, to see if anyone would take up the running. At last Harold Loudron hesitantly remarked:

  “I don’t see it’s all that improbable. Couldn’t he have gone to the river—assuming some kind of brainstorm—and severed the arteries, and then fallen in in a faint, or—or decided to finish himself off by jumping in?”

  Rebecca gave a little sob.

  “The trouble with that theory,” said Nigel, “is that no bloodstains have been found, and the nature of the cuts.”

  All but James, who was nodding sapiently, gazed at Nigel perplexed. He felt a tightening of tension in the room, but could not tell who was its source. Someone—or more than one—had keyed himself up at that “nature of the cuts.”

  “Yes,” he went on. “You see, there are only two cuts, and they are of an equal depth.”

  Graham Loudron rose abruptly to his feet, looked around for a cigarette box, took a cigarette and lit it and sat down again. At the mantelshelf Dr. James stood, stiff as a caryatid. Walter Barn was feverishly scratching his flaxen poll.

  “Could you favour us,” asked Graham coldly, “with some explanation? We’re not all authorities on forensic medicine here.”

  “Certainly. Suicides who—I’m sorry to have to go into all these details, Miss Loudron—who cut an artery generally go for the jugular. And they almost invariably make several tentative, exploratory cuts before they give the slash which kills them. Whether this is because they haven’t the nerve to do it decisively first time, or because they are ignorant of anatomy and searching for the exact place——”

  “But you can hardly argue,” interrupted Graham, “that my father was ignorant of anatomy.”

  “Indeed not. In the case of a doctor and a resolute man, the absence of exploratory cuts would mean a good deal less.”

  “Well then——”

  “It’s the depth that tells against suicide. Don’t you see? Was your father ambidextrous?”

  “Not particularly. Why?”

  “If you are normally right-handed, you would take the razor in your right hand to slash your left wrist. This cut would, partly at least, disable your left hand, so that—when you transferred the razor to it—you could not possibly make so deep a cut in the other wrist.”

  “I see,” said Graham woodenly. There was a considerable silence, broken finally by Walter Barn.

  “Must’ve been a gang.”

  “Oh for God’s sake!” Harold wearily protested.

  “No, I’m serious. Suppose he just took it into his head to go for a walk. Foggy night. Some ted bumps up against him: demands his wallet. Easy meat. But the old man resists. Puts up his hands, see? to ward off this ted. Who slashes at him, cuts both wrists, then dumps him in the river.”

  “I never heard such a ridiculous notion,” drawled Harold. “Why on earth should Father go for a walk in the middle of a foggy night?”

  “Maybe he went along after dinner to see you and your missus,” Walter answered, with an irresponsible grin.

  “She wasn’t—— What the hell d’you mean, to see us!”

  Harold exclaimed violently.

  “Well, to see you, then. I heard him talking to you on the telephone before dinner that night. ‘No, it can’t be as urgent as that,’ he said. ‘We’ll discuss it to-morrow.’ Maybe he changed his mind and toddled along after all.”

  Harold was quite white with anger. “Are you suggesting——?”

  “Let’s drop this,” interposed James. “My father went to bed early that night.”

  “People can get out of bed,” said Walter.

  “But they usually don’t when they’ve taken a sedative,” said James.

  “A sedative?” Rebecca’s eyes were opened wide.

  “He told us he was feeling sleepy. Sodium amytol—12 grains of it—was found in the stomach,” said James. “They can’t be certain how big the actual dose was. But it would have been enough, at least, to make him sleep for several hours.”

  Walt Barn bobbed up again. “Well, this beats everything! First someone tries to do him with a drug; then he’s——”

  “This isn’t the time or the place for clowning,” James heavily rebuked him.

  “Anyway, what were you doing here that night?” asked Harold. “It’s the first I’ve heard——”

  Walter’s bead-bright eyes switched to him. “I just looked in to see Becky. Before dinner. Next question?”

  Nigel intercepted a look which Rebecca gave the young painter at this point—a look of reproach, was it? or distrust? or apprehension? He decided to take a grip on the situation again.

  “The police will have to investigate all your movements that night. Very thoroughly. So I suggest we do not go into them now. But since Dr. James has asked me to hold a watching brief for the family, let me impress on you how important it is to tell them the exact truth. Being evasive, or telling lies with the mistaken object of protecting someone else, would cause endless trouble and confusion.”

  “Quite. Absolutely,” commented James in an authoritative manner.

  “It looks as if you were going to earn your money pretty easily.” Graham’s small mouth had a cynical twist. “And why should the protection of someone else be a mistaken object?”

  “Mr. Strangeways means that to suppose you can protect a person by telling lies to the police is a mistake,” said Rebecca severely, looking extraordinarily like her mother in the dining-room portrait.

  “I stand corrected,” Graham murmured. “Perhaps our private and personal investigator can tell us what deduction he draws from the missing razor?”

  “Missing razor?” Harold echoed.

  “Yes,” said Nigel. “Your father stopped shaving years ago, of course. But he kept his case of cut-throat razors. According to the inspector, one is missing from the case, and cannot be found in this house.”

  “And the deduction?” Graham persisted in his smooth, acid tone.

  “Either Dr. Piers did leave the house, taking the razor, with the intention of using it on himself elsewhere——”

  “Tactful, eh?” Walter outrageously muttered.

  “. . . Or someone used it on him in this house, and disposed of it later, probably in the same way the body was disposed of.”

  James Loudron broke the shocked silence. “But that would mean—would seem to imply that one of us—it’s inconceivable.”

  “If I used a razor on anyone, I’d simply wipe it off and put it back in the case,” said Walter brightly.

  “I can just imagine that,” remarked Harold.

  “Nasty, nasty!”

  Rebecca spoke up. “I think we ought to try and remember that it’s Father who is dead, and not be flippant about it all.”

  Walter’s mouth sprang open, but he managed to hold back whatever unconscionable utterance he had been on the point of making.

  “Your father kept case-books, I presume?” Nigel suddenly asked.

  “Oh yes,” said James. “In the surgery. In a cupboard he kept locked.”

  “Miss Loudron, when you searched for the diary, you didn’t think of looking in that cupboard?”

  “Yes. I did. There was no diary there.”

  “But you didn’t examine the case-books themselves?”

  “Certainly not. They are absolutely confidential.”

&
nbsp; “Then I think I’d better do so now.”

  “Oh no.” Rebecca was flustered but exceedingly firm. “That is quite out of the question. And in any case I can’t see why——”

  “Mr. Strangeways,” said Graham, looking at him with something nearer respect than he had yet shown, “has it in mind that Father might have used the empty pages of a case-book for his diary.”

  “Exactly. And if you will not allow me to look through them, there would surely be no breach of professional etiquette in Dr. James doing so? in my presence, of course?” And it’s not hard to see why the intelligent Dr. Piers had a soft spot for Graham Loudron, thought Nigel, when he is evidently so much quicker in the uptake than the others.

  “I can see no objection,” said James. He knocked out his pipe in the grate, and moved to go, but Graham made a slight gesture:

  “Reverting to what you said just now, Strangeways, how can the police suppose that my father was killed in this house? Surely there’d be traces? And also traces of the body being taken away?”

  “They were nosing about in Father’s car, and mine, yesterday afternoon,” said James grimly.

  “They’ve been all over the house,” Rebecca added. “And I suppose they’ll be back again soon. I must say they’re very polite and give as little trouble as possible.”

  “Like the bailiffs,” said Walter, grinning.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to ask if I may do just the same. Perhaps you would show me round”— Nigel smiled at Rebecca—“after your brother and I have visited the surgery.”

  James took Nigel down some back stairs and unlocked the door into the annexe. This contained a surgery, a dispensary and a waiting room. The surgery was a long, cream-washed room, with french windows at the far end opening on to the garden. While Dr. James unlocked a cupboard and took out a pile of foolscap-size manuscript books, Nigel surveyed the garden. On his left was a full-grown lime tree; in front a bed filled with rose-bushes heavily pruned; beyond that, a square of grass, and at the far end some terraced beds in which crocuses and snowdrops were showing, backed by the side wall of a house.

  “These really ought to go to his old hospital,” said James. “They’re quite exceptional. He was a remarkable diagnostician, you know. It’s partly experience, of course; but that isn’t enough in itself—one needs intuition, instinct, I don’t know what to call it.” His voice tailed off, and he began to read at random with an absorbed professional interest.

  “Are they dated? Each book, I mean?” Nigel gently asked.

  “What? Oh yes.”

  “Then try the most recent one first.”

  Dr. James went through the pile, found the 1959 and 1960 volumes, began to glance rapidly through the pages.

  “This is a bore for you,” he said over his shoulder. “Wouldn’t you rather go over the house while I’m doing this?”

  “I’m sorry, but I must be present. Then no one could accuse you of destroying the evidence.” Nigel’s tone was light, but James frowned and twitched his shoulders as if there was a load on them.

  “If I’d wanted to destroy evidence, I could have done it any time in the last ten days,” he said. “Besides, how do you know I’m going to tell you if I do come to the diary pages?”

  “Of course you are: because the police will soon be examining those books, and it’d look bad if you missed out something and they found it.”

  There was nothing in the recent volumes. James worked back, through the 1950’s and 1940’s. Three-quarters of an hour had passed. He came to the book for 1940, flipped his way through it. “Hallo! Look. There are some pages missing at the end.”

  Nigel took the volume from his hands. There were indications that four pages had been roughly removed. “So perhaps somebody has destroyed the evidence.”

  “My father could have torn them out himself, I suppose.”

  “But he wasn’t in the habit of taking out pages. None of the books so far have any missing?”

  “No.”

  “Well, carry on. Work backwards. It may not mean anything.”

  James finally put down the earliest volume. “Nothing more,” he said, sighing heavily. “No diary. No other pages missing.”

  “Then I’ll take the 1940 book and give it to the police. There may be fingerprints. Have you some newspaper I can wrap it in? I’ll write you a receipt now. And please tell no one about what we’ve found.”

  Presently Nigel walked out into the garden, the wrapped volume under his arm, to get some fresh air. Forsythia was blooming on the wall to the right of the rose-bed. Behind this wall, he discovered, lay a yard with tall wooden doors giving on to Burney Street, and the old coach-house which had been converted into a double garage. He strolled to the far end of the garden, and gazed unseeingly at the clumps of golden crocuses. “Now why,” he silently asked them, “why should Dr. Piers choose the 1940 book to keep his diary in, supposing those missing pages were a diary? Wouldn’t it have been more natural for him to have used the 1960 book, which has any number of blank pages?” The crocuses offered no reply. “What happened in 1940? The first blitzes. His finest hour? Twenty years ago. Does this mean anything, or is it just the alluring mouth of a blind alley?”

  Nigel walked slowly back to the house. Rebecca Loudron was waiting for him in her father’s study. Her eyes at once turned to the parcel under his arm. “Did you find anything?” she asked.

  “We didn’t find any diary pages, I’m afraid.”

  Rebecca waited for him to enlarge upon this; but, since he did not, bit her lip in obvious chagrin and rose abruptly. “You want to see over the house now?”

  “Yes, please. May we start at the top and work down?”

  The top floor consisted of a box-room and two others. These two were used for spare-rooms, she told him: they used to have maids in them, but servants were difficult to get nowadays and foreign helps often unreliable: so they had been managing lately with a woman to clean and another who came in occasionally to do the cooking if Rebecca was ill or away.

  “But you’re fond of cooking, yourself, or you wouldn’t be so good at it?”

  “Oh, yes. But it is a tie.”

  What a strange mixture she is, thought Nigel: so dull and conventional on the surface, and rather childlike—even now it’s as if she were playing at being the grown-up hostess; yet underneath there is real vitality, something long suppressed, ready to flower—or to explode?

  “You’ll miss your father very much?” he tentatively inquired.

  Her large, almost handsome face closed up. “I don’t know. I was used to him. At present I feel nothing. Just sort of dazed and empty.” She paused, struggling to make her thoughts articulate. “I suppose we all depended upon him too much. I don’t mean just for money.”

  Rather brusquely, as if she had given herself away, Rebecca led him down to the next floor. “These used to be the nurseries. We turned them into bed-sitters. That’s a bathroom. James and I share it. And Graham uses it. This is James’s room. I’m afraid it’s rather untidy—the woman doesn’t come to-day, and I haven’t had time to do it yet.”

  It was a pleasant, low-ceilinged room, its windows looking out on to the street. A smell of stale tobacco hung in the air. The bed-clothes were rumpled and wrinkled, as though James had spent a restless night. There was an electric fire, a comfortable arm-chair, shelves with medical works, detective novels and travel books meticulously segregated. A cabinet in one corner held a collection of botanical specimens.

  Next, they entered Rebecca’s own room. Whatever Nigel might have fancied, he would never have guessed it would be like this. A large room, overlooking the garden, low-ceilinged like James’s, the nursery bars still on the windows, and crammed with old-fashioned furniture—a large four-poster, a frilled dressing-table, a round mahogany Victorian table, an array of futile knick-knacks on the mantelshelf, daguerreotypes and silhouettes and gloomy landscapes on the walls, two basket-chairs and a nursing chair, a thick Turkey carpet, occasional tables littered
with photographs in silver frames, bowls of pot-pourri, nameless objects in poker-work—the eye was surfeited at one glance. Only one contemporary article could be descried amid the chaos: a magnificent radiogram.

  “They’re all my mother’s,” said Rebecca, flushing. “Papa wanted to auction them after she died, but he finally let me keep some of her things.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Eighteen. She died eight years ago.”

  “So you won that battle, anyway.”

  “Won—what do you mean?”

  “Your father finally let you keep some of her things, you said.”

  Rebecca looked a bit uncomfortable. “Well, yes, it was rather a struggle. Of course, I can understand now. He didn’t like them—mother had no taste, I suppose: like me: not his sort of taste anyway.”

  “And you were shocked to think he wanted to get rid of every trace of her? One can get tremendously indignant at eighteen.”

  “One can get tremendously indignant a good deal older than that,” she answered, with a sudden dryness which Nigel could imagine as inherited from her Scottish mother.

  “Yes,” he said. “On one’s own behalf. But the passionate, quixotic loyalty which makes one fight for someone else’s memory—that’s a youthful thing. An admirable thing, too.”

  Rebecca bowed her head, touched by the oblique praise.

  “Is this your mother? May I look?”

  “Yes. It was taken on their honeymoon. She looks very happy, doesn’t she?”

  But the face Nigel was observing in the silver-framed, faded photograph was that of the man who stood beside Mrs. Loudron. Dr. Piers had been clean-shaven in those days, so the lines of his intelligent face, tapering down from broad brow to narrow chin, and the slightly mischievous pout of the little mouth, were unobscured.

  “Funny,” he said, “your father reminds me of someone.”

  “Oh? Who?”

  “Who can it be? Does it remind you of anyone?”

  She studied the photograph. “I don’t think so. Perhaps I know it too well,” Rebecca slowly answered.

  Nigel did not press her. “That’s a noble bed. Though I don’t know how people didn’t get claustrophobia when they drew the bed-curtains.”