The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  She gave him a fleeting, timid glance, then unexpectedly giggled.

  “Papa said I was made on that bed, so I might as well lie on it.”

  “What music do you like best?” Nigel asked, pointing to the radiogram and the disc-holders beside it.

  “Mozart. He makes me feel young and—and bubbly. Don’t you think he’s marvellous?”

  “I do. And does Walter like him?”

  “I’m getting him to. In fact, we were playing the clarinet quintet and some piano concertos the night when——” Rebecca broke off abruptly. “Did you hear it?”

  “The clarinet quintet?”

  “I thought I heard the telephone.” She ran out to the head of the stairs and listened. “Perhaps someone has answered it. Well, we’d better be getting on.”

  “I hope I’m not taking up too much of your time.”

  “Oh, it’s all right. Graham said he’d cook the dinner today. He’s quite good at it. He cooked in the Seamen’s Hospital here for a bit, a year or two ago. Do you want to see his room?”

  “Yes, please. It was your mother’s, I think you told me.”

  “Yes. None of us felt much like using it after she died and Papa had built a suite over the annexe, so he put Graham into the room.”

  They were walking down another flight of stairs. At the bottom, of it next to the drawing-room, a door was ajar. Rebecca led the way in, after knocking. The room was empty—in more senses than one, Nigel felt. Its occupant was not there: cooking, presumably. But, although it was well furnished, Graham’s room gave a curious impression of anonymity, or of transient occupancy, like a college room in the vacation at the end of an academic year. No photographs, no books, no clothes thrown on to chairs, a pad of clean blotting-paper on the desk.

  “I say, it’s all very vacant, isn’t it?” remarked Nigel, cheerfully.

  “Graham keeps everything in his cupboards and drawers. Locked up.”

  “This is directly under your room, I take it. How long has Graham lived here?”

  “Let me see. Seven years, it’d be.”

  “It must have been strange for you at first—to have an adopted brother. But you all seem to get on pretty well now.”

  “Graham was rather difficult at first—to get to know, I mean. Of course he was only thirteen, and he’d had rather a bad time apparently.”

  “So you mothered him?” said Nigel, smiling at her.

  “Well, I tried.” A frown came and went on Rebecca’s face. “Actually, we sort of split up quite soon. James and I taking after Mother, I suppose it was inevitable we should feel closest to each other. Harold is built more on Father’s lines. Of course he was nine years older than Graham, but Graham used to tail round after him a lot in the holidays. I’m afraid I’m putting it all rather badly.”

  She has become so voluble, thought Nigel, because she wants to postpone going into her father’s room.

  “Would you rather I finished the tour by myself?” he asked.

  She looked momentarily puzzled: then her chin went up. “No. It’s all right, thank you.”

  They went down eight stairs to a half-landing, turned right and then left along a short passage, at the end of which Rebecca opened a door. Dr. Piers’s bedroom had a large window in its left-hand wall, looking out on to the lime tree and the gardens of houses farther up the hill: it was luxuriously furnished: a big, built-in wardrobe contained at least two dozen suits, all on hangers, and many pairs of shoes with shoe-trees in them. Nigel noticed three Picasso drawings on the wall opposite the bed. On the bedside table stood a telephone, a charming converted oil-lamp and a copy of Albertine Disparue: the lower shelf of this table held a portable radio.

  “And this is the bathroom?”

  “Yes,” said Rebecca, who was still standing in the bedroom door. “Do go in if you want.”

  The bathroom was equally luxurious in its way, but had nothing to say to Nigel. After glancing round it, he walked out again, and pointed to the bedroom window. “Was that shut when you and Graham came in, the morning of your father’s disappearance?”

  “Yes. It had been a foggy night.”

  “And the bedroom door was shut?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to try an experiment. What time did you start playing records that night?”

  A flash of apprehension came and went in her eyes. “It must have been about nine o’clock.”

  “And how long for?”

  “Well, off and on, till eleven.”

  “Will you go up to your room now and put on an L.P. record in three minutes’ time. Play it for a couple of minutes at the volume you were playing that night, then take it off. When you’ve taken it off, sit still and listen. I shall come up and ask you if you heard anything from below. Oh, and shut your window—I presume it was shut against the fog that night?”

  “Yes. All right. But I don’t understand——”

  As soon as she was gone, Nigel switched on at medium volume Dr. Piers’s bedside radio. A rather sepulchral voice came out of it: “. . . text is, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’”

  A sermon. Couldn’t be better. Nigel ran upstairs into Graham Loudron’s room. With the window shut he could still just hear the radio preacher’s voice. Presently he caught the Mozart D minor piano concerto from Rebecca’s room above: it was faint, and he could hear in occasional intervals the preacher’s voice. After a few minutes the gramophone stopped. Nigel waited for another couple of minutes, then he started to walk about, talking to himself, opening the window, moving a chair. Finally he went down and switched off the radio, and then walked up to Rebecca’s room. His questions evidently puzzled her. She said she had heard nothing for a couple of minutes after she had stopped the gramophone, but then she thought she had heard someone talking and moving about on the floor below, though she wasn’t sure.

  “Won’t you tell me what it’s all about?”

  “I hardly know myself,” replied Nigel. “I’ve discovered that from Graham’s room you can hear someone talking in your father’s, but from your room you can’t. Also that from your room you can hear movements in Graham’s.”

  “Well, I could have told you that.”

  “Did you hear any, that night?”

  Rebecca hesitated, flushing deeply. “I don’t remember. I couldn’t have, surely, with the gramophone on?”

  Nigel did not pursue it. But he felt sure that Rebecca was not speaking the truth.

  CHAPTER VI

  7+13 = 20

  NIGEL GLANCED AT the sheet of paper on the arm of his chair. It was his practice during an investigation to jot down anything done or said by those concerned which had struck him as out of character, self-betraying, contradictory, cryptic, or in some other way significant: not because, with his phenomenal memory, he would forget them but because, committed to paper, these random and heterogeneous items sometimes formed chemical associations, as it were, and created the beginnings of a pattern.

  PIERS LOUDRON: “My dear boy, at my age, and when one’s tenure of life is unlikely to be long protracted, one feels the need—not exactly for confession—but for the drawing up of a balance-sheet . . . My diary is giving me quite a new interest in life. It may even prolong it!”

  JAMES LOUDRON: A very heavy eater—insecurity, or energy? “If I’d wanted to destroy evidence, I could have done it any time in the last ten days.”

  HAROLD LOUDRON: In reply to Walter’s suggestion that Piers might have gone along after dinner to see Harold and Sharon—“She wasn’t—— what the hell d’you mean, to see us!” . . . Wasn’t at home?

  REBECCA LOUDRON: Her account of going with Graham to look for their father—why does this stick in my mind?

  Also, “we were playing the clarinet quintet and some piano concertos the night when——”

  GRAHAM LOUDRON: According to Rebecca, described the atmosphere at dinner the night his father disappeared as “papa was waiting for something to happen.”

  And what was he doing across the r
iver so early on Saturday morning?

  WALTER BARN: Not just the clown—one look enough for me.

  Nigel read through the notes. Then, after a pause, took out his pen and wrote beneath them: 7+13 =20: 1960 – 20 = 1940: cf. Em’s statement that during the 1940 blitzes P.L. acted “like he didn’t care whether he lived or died.”

  A car stopped outside. Going to the window, Nigel saw it was a police car, and observed his old friend, Chief Inspector Wright of the Yard’s C Division, get out. Wright looked more than ever like a film director—lantern-jawed face, horn-rimmed spectacles, alert, darting eyes. Nigel brought him into the studio, where Clare kissed him warmly. In her presence, Wright loved to give an exaggerated performance of the bumbling middlebrow, the man who knows what he likes. He bent a cautious look upon the Female Nude.

  “Well, you’ve got something there,” he opined. “Massive and concrete.”

  “You should hear what my char says about it.”

  “Don’t tell me! I know.” Wright went outside, re-entered the studio with a heavy, bunioned gait, apprehensively circled the Female Nude. “Gruesome, ain’t it? Gives yer the creeps. Do I ’ave to dust that?”

  Clare’s laughter pealed out. “I’ll get some drinks.”

  “So they’ve sent for the Murder Squad,” said Nigel.

  “Your D.D.I.’s a first-rate man; but he’s got too much on his plate just now. A wave of theft at the docks. And there’s a mob of teds terrorising the respectable residents of Shooters Hill—but can Henderson get any witnesses to come forward?—‘You were at home, sir, yesterday evening when a gang of youths broke every window in the multiple stores opposite your house’?—‘Yes, but I didn’t see or hear nothing, didn’t pay no attention.’ Here lies the dear old British Public, and the epitaph on its tombstone is, ‘I don’t want to have nothing to do with that.’ And then they’ve had a buzz that there’s a drug-distributing racket shifted its base to just across the river—our Narcotics boys are working on that with Henderson. Thank you, Miss Massinger, just a touch of cyanide and plenty of soda.”

  The sound of the St. Alfege bells ringing for Sunday Evensong could be distinctly heard.

  “To heaven or to hell,” said Wright. “I’ve just had a long talk with Henderson, and he’s given me acres of bumf for my homework to-night. So you’ve got your foot in the door again, Strangeways?”

  “Yes. Are you and the D.D.I. convinced it’s murder?”

  “Hey, what’s this? The family bribing you to prove it suicide or something?” The chief inspector’s tone was gently mocking, but his eyes on Nigel were sharp as dressed flints.

  “Well, did you ever hear of someone being murdered by severing his wrist arteries? The jugular, yes. But——”

  “There’s got to be a first time for everything.”

  “And, even if the old man died quickly of shock, there’d be a hell of a lot of blood. But there are no traces of it anywhere in the house or annexe or garden.”

  “Which makes the suicide theory even more impossible than the murder one.”

  “I know. So far as his own house is concerned. It looks as if it must have happened somewhere else.”

  “Why?” said Clare dreamily.

  “Why? But don’t you see——?”

  “The Romans used to do it in their bath. Cut their arteries. Suppose Dr. Piers did just that. And bled to death. And someone ran the water out of the bath. There’d be no trace—not if you wiped the bath round afterwards.”

  Wright was gazing at her keenly, his eyes sparking.

  “But if that’s how it happened, why should the person who found him dead go to the trouble and danger of putting him in the river?”

  “And if he was murdered in his bath,” said Nigel, “he would have been killed in that way to make it look like suicide. So, again, why throw the body in the river?”

  “And why remove one of his cut-throat razors?” asked Wright. “Why not leave the weapon beside him in the bath?”

  “The sleeping-draught could work either way, I suppose. The murderer gives it to him at dinner to make him go upstairs early—to his bedroom adjoining a bathroom—and soften him up. Or Dr. Piers might have taken it himself, after dinner, to dull the suicide process.”

  Curled up on the sofa, Clare shivered delicately like a cat. “I think it’s all perfectly horrible. I doubt if one could wholly approve of Dr. Piers, but at least he was someone—he stood out.” She sighed, then added, “Don’t suicides generally leave notes?”

  “The missing diary pages might have constituted a suicide note. Has the D.D.I. had any luck with them?”

  “There are two sets of fingerprints,” Wright answered. “Both on the left-hand page facing the first missing page. One lot are Dr. Piers’s: the other will probably be Dr. James Loudron’s—we’re taking his to-morrow, and everyone else’s in the family and household. The pages were ripped out, not cut out.” He pantomimed, bending wide open an imaginary exercise book with the fingers of his left hand while tearing out pages with the other. “You see, it should leave a very strong thumb-print on the left-hand page. But there isn’t one: only faint marks. What does that suggest?” The C.I.D. man had developed a habit of shooting such questions at his subordinates; it was part of their education, and kept them up to the mark.

  “Gloves, of course,” Nigel replied. “And you would hardly wear gloves to tear pages out of a book unless those pages incriminated you.”

  “Incriminated you for what?”

  Nigel smiled. “You’re trying to edge me over to the murder theory. But Jack the Book-Ripper could have had other reasons.”

  “Such as what?”

  “For example, he might prefer that his fingerprints should not be found on the book, supposing that he planned to use those missing pages as a lever against someone else.”

  “Oh lord! Don’t start bringing blackmail in now. Isn’t one crime enough for you?” Wright jumped impatiently to his feet, strode over to a shelf which held a herd of the little archaic clay horses, with spout-like muzzles, that were Clare’s form of doodling. “We’re doing what I’m always on at my chaps not to do—theorising without enough facts.” He took up one of the horses, gave it an imaginary lump of sugar, and put it down again. “Murder cases are solved by dozens of men in macintoshes going into thousands of houses and asking tens of thousands of people a few simple questions. Not,” he continued, moving over to Nigel’s chair and stubbing his finger on the sheet of paper, “not by doing abstract equations. ‘7+13=20: 1960–20=1940’—what the devil’s this in aid of?”

  “Not so abstract, my dear fellow. It struck me as odd that, if those missing pages are in fact Dr. Piers’s diary, he should have used his 1940 case-book for it instead of his 1960 one, which has plenty of blank pages. Did the year 1940 have some special meaning for him? Well, he was a hero in the blitzes, by all accounts—and a desperate hero.”

  “I dare say. But what’s this ‘7+13=20’?”

  “Rebecca Loudron told me that Graham Loudron was adopted by Dr. Piers, at the age of thirteen, seven years ago. So he was born in 1940.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t know what. Perhaps I’m becoming a number-fetishist.”

  “I’d stick to shoes, if I were you.”

  “Has it occurred to anyone,” asked Clare after a pause, “that Graham’s adoption was a bit peculiar?”

  “In what way?” said Wright.

  “Well, we are told his father was Dr. Piers’s best friend and killed in the war. Why did Dr. Piers wait till 1953 to adopt him? Because Graham’s mother was alive till then? Possibly, but we don’t know when she died. And wasn’t it rather excessive to adopt him?—I mean, for a rather selfish and patriarchal man like the doctor? The Jews set such store by their own flesh and blood. I’m surprised he didn’t just take Graham into his house, educate him and so on, without making him one of the family and giving him his name.”

  “I’m not,” said Nigel.

  Clare opened her dark eyes
wide at him.

  “You see, I strongly suspect Graham is Dr. Piers’s real son. Rebecca has a photograph of her father on honeymoon with his wife in the early twenties. And there’s a distinct resemblance between the young Piers and Graham.”

  “Do you suppose his—any of the family know this?”

  Nigel shrugged his shoulders. “No idea. But they’d better not know that we suspect it. If it’s true, it would account for Piers’s rather strange action in adopting a boy soon after his wife died. He couldn’t while she was alive, either because it would be bad taste or because she knew about his peccadillo. Or, of course, both.”

  “Well,” said Chief Inspector Wright, “that’s an interesting little bit of home chat. I don’t see what bearing it could have on the case, but you follow it up if you like. Just your line. The mad archæologist. Loves digging up the past. I must go and do some work. Thank you kindly for the drink, ma’am.”

  “Just a moment. I suggest you get the Fraud Squad to look discreetly into Harold Loudron’s affairs. I——”

  “It’s being done. Henderson’s idea. Any further instructions?” Wright grinned cockily at Nigel.

  “Yes, you hard-faced servant of Loranorder. Tell your Narcotics chums that Mrs. Harold Loudron is, or recently has been, a drug addict. Also—no, perhaps not.”

  “Yes? Don’t clam up on me. All contributions gratefully received.”

  “Well, I fancy that there’s some kind of complicity between Mrs. Harold and Graham. I noticed it after dinner there one night—the first time we met the family. It may be just that they’re bed-mates, but it didn’t feel like that.”

  “Very instructive, I’m sure.”

  “In his short career, Graham has been for brief periods a pianist in a jazz band and a cook at the Seamen’s Hospital here.”

  “Ah. Now you’re talking. Lascars smuggling in hemp, eh? And night-club hot-number types tend to coke themselves up. Any dirt on other characters involved?”

  “I’m not prepared to release it at present.”

  “Hoity-toity.”

  “I like to pan my dirt, in case there’s some gold in it. And that’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say ‘hoity-toity’ since a scholarly great-aunt of mine rebuked me, at the age of fourteen, for putting her right on a quotation she’d made from a chorus in the Trachiniae.”