The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  “I suppose you do. But why shouldn’t you? You don’t think I croaked the old man, do you?”

  “Well, that’ll be all for the present. We’ll just take your fingerprints.”

  When this had been done and the sergeant sent to fetch Rebecca Loudron, Nigel said to Wright:

  “This alleged quarrel between Dr. Piers and his daughter—were you inventing it?”

  “Inventing? Certainly not,” Wright replied rather curtly. “Graham Loudron gave it in evidence to the D.D.I.”

  “He did, did he? And did Miss Loudron admit it?”

  “She agreed there’d been a row, yes. Played it down a bit, though.”

  “And Walter Barn may not have left this house that night?”

  “Yes. You caught him out very neatly there.”

  Nigel gazed non-committally at the inspector. “Do you see her as a Lady Macbeth? a parricidal Lady Macbeth?”

  Before Wright could answer, Rebecca Loudron came in. The sergeant returned to his hard chair and unobtrusively took out his shorthand note-book. Rebecca had this new look of maturity still, but there was a glaze of uneasiness over it, which did not escape Wright’s notice.

  “I’m sorry to be badgering you, Miss Loudron—particularly after the distressing ordeal you had this morning.”

  “Will they make trouble for Walt? They were horrible. Can they have him arrested for—whatever it’s called—assault and battery?”

  Wright smiled at her. “Technically, they could sue him, yes. But I doubt if they will. Depends whether their paper decides it’d be good publicity. It’d mean washing some dirty linen in court. But of course I shall have to make a report to your local police about it. Incidentally, was there no one in the house who could have helped you to deal with them?”

  “Well, James was having a surgery. And Graham—I don’t know where he was: I called out to him, but he didn’t come.”

  The inspector gently sounded Rebecca about the quarrel with her father; but he did not seem to get any further than the D.D.I. had done, judging by his reception of her answers, in which there showed clearly a conflict between loyalty to the dead and resentment at her father’s attitude towards Walter and herself. Nigel studied the woman’s face and manner: the strong nose, the fine, slightly protuberant brown eyes, the heavy eyebrows; the odd mixture of gaucheness and dignity. Suddenly her woman’s nature broke through the web of Wright’s interrogation.

  “Why are you asking me all these questions? Everyone knows Papa and I quarrelled a lot about Walt.” Her lips quivered, then set firmly. “Do you really think I could—could kill Papa because he wouldn’t let me marry Walt?”

  Wright looked at her with surprise and respect. He said, lightly, at his most charming, “I expect you often felt like doing it.”

  Rebecca returned his gaze, shocked for a moment by Wright’s unofficial comment, then timidly smiling. “Well, of course he did make me very angry sometimes. But——”

  “And you have no alibi,” continued Wright, smiling still as if he were a friend, a brother, gently teasing her. “Sitting up there all alone playing gramophone records.”

  Rebecca glanced at him suspiciously. Her instinct told her this was not just a bit of rather tasteless badinage. She remained silent, watchful.

  “Or were you? What would you say if I told you that we have evidence you were not alone that night?” It was a common gambit in police interrogation, but it still made Nigel uncomfortable. He quickly said:

  “You told me that yourself. Yesterday morning. You said, ‘We were playing the clarinet quintet and some piano concertos the night when——’ and then you broke off and pretended to have heard the telephone.”

  “It was a slip of the tongue,” she got out hurriedly.

  “Oh, come, Miss Loudron. That really won’t do, will it?” said Wright. “Anyway, why should you be afraid to say Mr. Barn was with you that night? It gives you both an alibi, doesn’t it—at any rate up to the time he left you? What time did he leave?”

  Rebecca Loudron simply did not have the resources to cope with this sort of thing. The flustered, mutinous look which Nigel had seen on her face, when her father had been exercising his sarcasm, showed again now.

  “About midnight,” she muttered. “But there was nothing—we did nothing wrong,” she defiantly added.

  She’s talking about sex, not about murder, thought Nigel: either she’s innocent, or a very remarkable actress: like Lady Macbeth. Wright continued to probe. Walter Barn, whom Rebecca had telephoned in great distress after the last scene with her father, had talked with her in the kitchen till dinner, then gone up to her room, where she rejoined him at about quarter to nine after her father went to bed. She and Walter had been together there all the time till he left: neither had gone out of the room, even for a minute: she had smuggled him up some supper, and they talked and played records.

  “It all sounds extremely innocent,” Wright remarked. “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

  Rebecca looked indecisive, as if trying to work out, not an answer, but the implications of the answer. Finally, she threw up her head, giving it to them fair and square. “Walt asked me not to.”

  “Isn’t that rather odd, since it gives you both an alibi?—for some of that night, anyway, and assuming you are telling the truth.”

  “Oh, I’m telling the truth”—Rebecca threw it off almost negligently, as if it hardly needed saying. “You see Walt isn’t—he’s working-class, and they don’t like being mixed up in anything to do with—well, the police.”

  “‘I don’t want to have nothing to do with that,’” Nigel murmured, quoting the inspector’s own words of Sunday evening.

  “Let’s leave that. Now, Miss Loudron”—Wright spoke slowly and with the utmost seriousness—“when you were up in your room with Mr. Barn, did you hear anything? Anything out of the usual, anything that puzzles you now?”

  There was a protracted pause. Rebecca seemed to be struggling with something in her mind. At last she said, uncertainly, in a low tone:

  “Well, we did think we heard voices, from Graham’s room.”

  “Whose voices?”

  “Graham’s. And—well, it sounded like Sharon’s, the other one: but it couldn’t have been, because she was at home.”

  “A woman’s voice, at any rate? Angry? Frightened? How did it sound?”

  Rebecca’s face flushed darkly. She jerked out, “It was—sort of laughing. And then—then it cried out.” She lowered her eyes. “We—Walt thought they were love-making.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps an hour after I’d gone up.”

  Wright could get nothing more precise than this out of her. “And that was all? You didn’t hear anyone leave the house later?”

  “No. You see the gramophone was on most of the time.”

  “Or—your room’s at the back, isn’t it?—a car leaving your garage?”

  “No. But nobody’d have taken out a car in a fog like that, surely?”

  After a few more questions, Wright took Rebecca’s fingerprints and let her go. The sergeant was sent to fetch Graham Loudron. One of Inspector Wright’s great gifts as a detective officer was his capacity for intuitively adapting himself to the personality of each different witness. With the bouncy, like Walter Barn, he could enter into the game, become jolly and unofficial, but also—if need arose—bounce them so hard that they were deflated. Rebecca he had handled, not just with sympathy, but with a kind of gentle firmness and decisiveness that would feel like moral support to one lacking in self-confidence and mental clarity. When he interviewed Graham Loudron, Nigel saw Wright’s method with a natural arguer of the toss.

  As soon as Graham saw Nigel in the study, he asked Wright, “Is Mr. Strangeways here officially?”

  “Do you object to his presence?” said Wright, no less coolly.

  “No, I’m just surprised.”

  “Inspector Wright has allowed me to co-operate,” Nigel put in
. “I’m here to see that none of you makes a fool of himself.”

  While Wright questioned Graham Loudron about his movements on the night of Dr. Piers’s disappearance, Nigel studied the young man’s personality. It was difficult to believe he was only twenty: the triangular face, the small, protrusive mouth, the eyes that fastened like limpets on whomsoever he was talking to, together with Graham’s self-contained manner, deferential yet obscurely derisive—all gave the impression of an experience beyond his years: experience, but not maturity.

  “You told Inspector Henderson that the deceased was ‘waiting for something to happen’ that night at dinner. Can you enlarge upon it?”

  “I don’t think so. It was a feeling I had.”

  “You had it at the time? You’re sure it didn’t come to you later, as a result of what happened?”

  “Perfectly sure.”

  “You felt he was nervous . . . apprehensive?”

  “No, not exactly. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. And it was as if he was keying himself up.”

  “To commit suicide?”

  Graham shrugged. “How can I tell? I’m not a mind-reader. I thought you’d rejected the idea of suicide, anyway.” There was a hint of a question in his last remark, but Wright ignored it.

  “You didn’t see your father take a sleeping-draught, at dinner or just before?”

  “No.”

  According to Graham, he, James Loudron and their father had had a glass of sherry together just before dinner: Dr. Piers drank nothing with the meal, but had coffee after it in the dining-room: Rebecca had made the coffee and poured it out.

  “As he felt sleepy soon after dinner, it looks as if he must have taken the sleeping-draught either in his sherry or privately before that.”

  Graham Loudron agreed.

  “And after dinner you went up to your room and stayed there till you went to bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alone all the time?”

  “I’ve already told Inspector Henderson all this.”

  “Yet your sister heard voices from your room—at about ten o’clock.”

  Graham’s eyes, expressionless as shell-fish, gave nothing away. “She’s mistaken.”

  “A woman’s voice. You say you did not have a woman in your room?”

  “What woman am I supposed to have had?”

  “Please answer the question, Mr. Loudron.”

  “If I had had a woman there, I should certainly not tell you who it was,” replied Graham coolly.

  “I’m not asking for her name. I’m asking, was there a woman in your room?”

  “Is there any reason why I should tell you?”

  “Yes. Two reasons. If you don’t, you are obstructing the police in their duties: and you are depriving yourself of a possible alibi for part of the period, at least, during which your father died.”

  “Died? You evidently mean ‘was murdered’.”

  “Well?”

  Graham’s lips twisted sourly. “I don’t want an alibi, and I don’t care a damn about obstructing the police.”

  “Tell me, did you love your adopted father?”

  Graham swallowed hard. “He was very good to me. But I wouldn’t say he was a lovable man. If you mean, do I want to see his murder avenged, I’m sorry but I can’t think in melodramatic terms like that.”

  “Did you ever suspect he might be your real father?”

  The young man crossed his knees and began smoothing his sleek hair. His voice remained quite smooth. “Well, of course I have wondered. I couldn’t imagine why he should be so fond of me, do so much for me. But he never said anything about it.”

  “And your mother, when she was alive—did she not talk about your father?”

  “Do you have to drag my mother into this?” For the first time, Graham showed emotion. Then, controlling himself, he said, “She didn’t. All she told me was that he had died, in the war, soon after I was born.”

  Inspector Wright switched back to the night of Dr. Piers’s death. No, Graham had heard no sounds from Dr. Piers’s room. Yes, he thought he had heard a car that night, driving out of the garage yard: it was just after he had gone to bed—about eleven o’clock. Why had he not mentioned this before?—nobody had asked him. Whose car did he think it was?—he hadn’t given it a thought, but assumed now it must have been Dr. James going out to an emergency call.

  “Why did you go over to the Isle of Dogs last Saturday morning So early?” asked Wright, switching the probe again.

  “But I didn’t.”

  “But I saw you coming out of the Greenwich tunnel, on this side, at half past seven,” said Nigel.

  “Ah. The household spy at work,” remarked Graham. His naked antipathy for Nigel, which the latter had felt the first time they met, again made the air vibrate between them.

  “So you admit you were lying?” asked Wright at his chilliest.

  “I admit nothing of the sort. You asked why I went over to the Isle of Dogs on Saturday morning. I didn’t. I went there on Friday night and stayed overnight.”

  The inspector was on his feet, quick as a spring released, and standing over Graham. “Don’t you come this schoolboy logic-chopping over me, young man—I don’t wear that sort of thing. Why did you go to the Isle of Dogs?”

  “I went to visit an old tart in Poplar, and we got talking, and by then it was so late I stayed the night in her house,” replied Graham, his composure quite unruffled.

  “Her name and address, please.”

  “I fail to see what my nocturnal occupations have to do with the case you’re——”

  “Don’t start arguing the toss with me. If you persist in being childish, I shall send men round every house in Poplar, with your photograph: they’ll find out soon enough: and meanwhile I shall put you in the can for obstruction.”

  “And what does the family friend say about that?” Graham addressed Nigel with a sneer.

  “Do what the inspector asks you, and stop making a b.f. of yourself,” Nigel equably replied.

  Graham Loudron gave the name and address. While his fingerprints were being taken, he remarked off-handedly, “You’ll be wasting your time on old Nelly. I go and talk to her now and then about my mother. She used to know her. But if I’m allowed to make a suggestion——”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Ask brother James about his mum. Ask him what she died of. Our friend here, who’s so keen on secret passages in private lives, might be interested.” Graham paused, then said with remarkable bitterness, “Funny, isn’t it, the idea of a woman in a posh house like this dying of neglect?”

  When Graham Loudron had gone, the inspector flashed at Nigel one of his rare smiles, that were like the edge of a hatchet. “Beginning to open up, aren’t they, my dear old household spy? Why has that young chap got it in for you?”

  “Natural antipathy, I suppose.”

  “Bit of the old lag about him, I thought—I don’t mean just that sea-lawyering. Wonder if he’s been inside.”

  “Yes, I’ve felt that. An approved school could have done it; or an orphanage even, if it was a bad one.”

  The sergeant ushered in Dr. James Loudron, who had agreed to give Wright an interview between his surgery hour and starting his rounds.

  “I hope we can get this over quickly,” he said; “the work’s getting on top of me with my father——”

  “I’m sure we can, Doctor,” Wright cut in briskly. He asked James first about the sleeping-draught: James had nothing to contribute here: he certainly hadn’t seen the old man taking any that night; nor had he noticed anything out-of-the-way in his father’s behaviour at dinner, except perhaps that he talked rather less than usual.

  “And now, Doctor, let me make sure that I’m clear about your own movements, just for the record. You went out shortly after dinner to see a patient?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Hyams. Her first confinement. I walked along to her house about 8 p.m.”

  “And returned here?”

  “At 10.15.�
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  “The baby having been born?”

  “Just so.”

  “No complications?”

  “I wasn’t entirely happy about the patient. She was very weak, and I feared a post-natal hæmorrhage. Our district nurse, who was mid-wifing, had to go straight off on another job, so I thought I’d look in on Mrs. Hyams again.”

  “You have a most excellent reputation for conscientiousness, Doctor. I’ve discovered that already.” Wright was at his most bland and disarming. “I must say, if I’d been you, I’d have thought twice about walking back again to a patient in a fog like you had here.”

  A shocked, slightly censorious look replaced the modestly gratified one with which James had received the inspector’s compliment. “It’d be highly unprofessional not to——”

  “How long did it take you to walk back there?”

  A dark flush, reminding Nigel of Rebecca Loudron, came over his face, and a bead or two of sweat started on his forehead.

  “Nearly ten minutes, I should think. But I didn’t walk, you know. I took out a car that time.”

  “Your car?”

  “My father’s. Mine had developed a fault—the petrol feed. I put it right a day or two later.”

  “What made you use a car, if I may ask, when you’d walked the first time?”

  “Well, I was extremely tired; and I thought the fog had lifted a bit. I was wrong,” Dr. James added ruefully.

  “You found your way, though, in the end?”

  “Yes.”

  “To—where does this Mrs. Hyams live?”

  “In Crane Street.”

  Oh lord! thought Nigel. That’s torn it! Wright, ignorant as yet of the topography of Greenwich, could hardly be expected to know that Crane Street was a narrow passage, not negotiable by traffic, running past the back of the Trafalgar Tavern. “So you’d naturally park the car by the Trafalgar Tavern, near the opening into Crane Street?” he said.

  “Yes. That’s where I left it,” replied James Loudron looking a bit puzzled. Nigel dared not meet Wright’s eye. The doctor began to bluster a little:

  “I’m sure you know your job, Inspector. But I’m a busy man, and I can’t for the life of me see the point of these questions.” He hunched the heavy shoulders which had often bullocked their way through the loose in hospital cup-ties.