The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

“I thought you were one. I’ll never forget that night you played for us after dinner here. ‘He was her man, and he done her wrong.’ You were thinking about your mother when you plugged that refrain, weren’t you?”

  Graham, who had come out in the warmth of Nigel’s praise and interest, now closed up again. “‘Frankie and Johnnie’ is a song about homosexuals,” he coldly replied.

  Five minutes later, Nigel was sitting with Rebecca Loudron, who had just come in from shopping. In the elegant drawing-room, where she had taken him, Rebecca looked out of place with her heavy limbs and country tweeds: she also looked, for no reason that Nigel could think of, on her guard. After a few polite formalities, made the more absurd both by her new grande-dame manner and by the cloud under which the Loudrons were living, she came out with, “I do hope the police will clear up this matter soon, Mr. Strangeways. People are beginning to talk in Greenwich.”

  “Unpleasant talk, you mean—about your family?”

  “Yes. And they look at me in such a horrid way, some of them, in the shops.”

  “It must be wretched for you. But there’s probably no malice behind it: only a sort of gloating curiosity. You must outface them. It’ll die down soon.”

  “My father was very popular in the district,” said Rebecca with constraint. “They think one of us killed him, for his money.”

  “Which of you?”

  “Harold. Or Graham. But some are saying it was me—it’s got round about my father’s opposition to Walter.”

  “But my dear girl, how do you know what they’re saying? They don’t say it to your face.”

  “They wouldn’t dare.” Her hands gripped the arms of the high-backed chair in which she sat bolt upright. “No, one of Walt’s friends heard talk, in a public house.” Her formal manner suddenly cracked. “Oh, it’s so beastly,” she wailed. “How much longer will it go on? James is so dreadfully worried—I don’t know what to do about him.”

  “Well, you’ve got Walter.”

  Rebecca’s lip began to quiver. “I haven’t seen him for nearly two days. How can he be so unkind!”

  “He’s busy, I expect,” said Nigel soothingly.

  “He told me, last time I saw him, that he didn’t think my having so much money would be good for him—for his painting,” she said in a frozen little voice.

  “Well, that’s a new line for him. But he hasn’t broken it off, has he?”

  “No. I don’t know. Oh, I’m so miserable! All this suspicion, poisoning everything! He even——” Rebecca broke off, twisting her handkerchief.

  “He even suspects you? But you and he were together till midnight.”

  Rebecca’s eyes swerved away from his. “Father could—it could have been done before I went back to my room after dinner,” she muttered. “Or after Walter left. Couldn’t it?”

  “It might, I suppose. And, if so, Walter could have done it—that’s what’s really worrying you most, isn’t it?—before you went up to your room, or on his way out of the house at midnight?”

  Rebecca hid her face ashamedly in her hands.

  “And he’s saying that marriage to a rich woman would be bad for his painting, although he’d never been troubled about that before—you’re afraid it might be because he killed your father, and then lost his nerve and is trying to cut away his obvious motive for doing so?”

  She nodded, her face still buried in her hands. Yes, it could be that, thought Nigel; or it could be that Walter suspects her of having murdered Dr. Piers, and is pulling out so as not to get further embroiled. Walter is one who likes not to be involved, particularly where the police are concerned. On the other hand, it was he who originally asked Rebecca to say she had been alone in her room that night. If Rebecca told the truth about that. If.

  Nigel decided he had come to an impasse on this line. “Tell me,” he asked, “about this quarrel your father and mother had, a year before she died.”

  Rebecca’s head went up as if sharply jerked by a bridle.

  “Quarrel? How do you——? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I’m all for loyalty. But blind loyalty can do appalling damage.”

  “I’d rather not talk about it. You’d better ask James. It’s a private, family thing. He must decide whether you should be told about it.”

  “Can you give me an assurance that it is germane to this—to your investigations?” Dr. James Loudron asked, a couple of hours later.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Very well. But it’s a painful matter to revive, even after all these years.”

  Dr. James sat at the head of the dining-room table, where he had just finished a scrambled lunch under the formidable eye of his dead mother, whose portrait hung on the wall behind him. Rebecca had not exaggerated her brother’s state: he looked positively hag-ridden, and his burly form seemed to have shrunk within his clothes.

  He poured himself another glass of water, holding up the glass to the light as if measuring a dose. “Are you quite sure you won’t have, a bite of lunch? Becky could easily——”

  “No, thanks. I go without lunch as often as not; and I never take more than a light one.”

  James gave him the automatic, professional eye. “Yes? Well, you look all right on it. I dare say we make too much fuss about a regular diet, though——” his voice tailed away.

  “You’re going to tell me about the quarrel.”

  “Yes. Ah, here’s Becky with the coffee. You’ll have a cup?”

  “Thanks.”

  They sat in silence till his sister withdrew again. Then James, with a lunging movement of his body, which suggested the breaking from some shackles of inhibition, plunged into the story.

  “It was about eight years ago. One evening. I was in my third year of training. We were sitting in the drawing-room after dinner—my mother, Becky, and I. Father came in with some letters in his hand. He was—I’d never seen anyone look like that before: white-hot with anger; but sort of frantic too, as if he’d just woken up and found himself buried alive. He walked over to my mother and shook the letters in her face. He said—look here, I can’t see why you want to know all this.”

  “Never mind. Carry on.”

  “He said, ‘Janet, I hope you realise you’re a murderess, as well as a thief.’ Mother said, ‘I did it for your own good.’ He said, ‘You did it out of poisonous, despicable jealousy.’ I’ll never forget their words, or their faces. It was terrible. We’d never seen them quarrel before—not in a deadly way like that. They forgot we were in the room even, till Becky became hysterical. I had to take her out and calm her down: actually she was quite ill for several days afterwards.”

  “So that’s all you heard of the quarrel?”

  “No. I came down again. Father was still at it. I didn’t go in. I—I listened at the door. I was afraid he might do her some physical violence and I thought I’d better be on hand.”

  “So you were able to piece the story together?”

  “Yes. Of course, neither of them said a word to any of us about it afterwards. But from then on my father treated mother—well, as if she simply wasn’t there. It was bitterly cruel; whatever she’d done she didn’t deserve that. We had a miserable year. Then she died. Of course, she had a bad heart condition before: but she couldn’t go on living, with my father behaving as he did.”

  Nigel watched James Loudron intently. The emotion released through that hag-ridden face was painful to see. The doctor was beyond embarrassment, gripped by a feeling which shook to bits his usual stolid, professional decorum.

  “I take it,” said Nigel, “that those letters were from a young woman who had had a child by your father and was appealing to him for help?”

  “They were blackmailing letters,” James grimly rejoined.

  “How do you know? You didn’t read them.”

  “That’s what Mother called them.”

  The two Millies, thought Nigel: Janet Loudron’s blackmailing bitch; Nelly’s sweet-as-narcissus friend. He said:

/>   “Your mother had intercepted the letters, then?”

  Janet Loudron, according to James’s account, must have opened the first of them quite by mistake. Two or three more came, which she was then on the look-out for. Dr. Piers, a few days before this hideous scene, had somehow got to hear of Millie’s death in 1945. He must have wondered why she had never written to tell him that she was very ill and no longer receiving money from him: but suppose she had written, what could have become of the letters? There was only one answer, to anyone familiar with Janet’s possessive, moralistic and ambitious nature. She would see Millie as not only an episode in her husband’s past which must be hushed up, but as a potential menace to his career as well as their marriage: it was not in her to feel the sweetness and unselfishness (if Nelly was right about Millie’s character) which breathed through the letters. But why had she hidden, not destroyed them? Because, thought Nigel, their existence would represent for her a latent source of power over her brilliant and authoritarian husband; or perhaps simply because she was the kind of woman who keeps everything. Anyway, what did it matter now?

  “You and Rebecca used to talk about this sometimes, after your mother died?”

  “Yes. It was partly therapeutic. I mean, Becky had taken it very hard, as I told you. And I judged it was better for her to talk about it than to keep it bottled up.”

  “Very wise, I dare say. And one day Graham overheard you both discussing it.”

  “So that’s how you knew—it would be Graham, the little bastard.”

  “‘Bastard’—do you realise what you’re saying?”

  James Loudron gave him a puzzled look. “Well, he is an absolute—” his slowish wits were visibly working—“good God, you’re not suggesting——?”

  “Surely it must have occurred to you that Graham might be this girl Millie’s child by your father?”

  “What? Occur to me that my father would bring his bastard into our house and give him my mother’s room to live in? I must say you credit me with a pretty lurid imagination.”

  Nigel was unimpressed by this disclaimer, but did not say so.

  “Well, your mother was dead. Your father may have felt he must make some reparation to the other woman and her child.”

  “Yes, but damn it, Mother’s own room! Talk about adding insult to injury!”

  Nigel gazed steadily at him. “You took sides, didn’t you?”

  “Took sides?”

  “You and Janet were against your father, on your mother’s side, after the quarrel. And you still are, though they’re both dead.”

  “What if I am?” James glared back at him with a kind of fuddled menace, almost as if his unwonted display of emotion had intoxicated him. Nigel let the silence protract itself.

  “Well, what if I am?” James repeated. Then slowly, with the air of one who makes an almost incredible discovery, he went on, “You’re not suggesting that I—that I’ve been saving up my bitterness against my father for the way he treated my mother—saving it up for eight years?”

  “Savings accumulate,” murmured Nigel.

  “You must be mad. If I was going to kill him, I wouldn’t have waited all this time. Damn it, we got on quite reasonably well together——”

  “Well then, who did kill him? Who is it you’ve been trying to protect?”

  James Loudron rose abruptly and lunged out of the room.

  CHAPTER XI

  The Naked and the Dead

  FOR THE THIRD time Nigel rang the bell of the house overlooking the green expanses of Blackheath. He was about to turn away when the door at last opened.

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Walter Barn. “I was working. What d’you want?”

  “To talk to you. I can come back later.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. The best of the light has gone, anyway.”’

  He led Nigel through a nondescript hall into a large room at the back of the house. The hard, cold north light came through french windows, mercilessly exposing an unmade camp-bed, a gas ring with a dirty saucepan on it, muddy canvases on the walls, a kitchen table littered with paints, rags, jam-jars full of brushes. There was a smell of turpentine and poverty.

  “Welcome to my humble abode,” said Walt. “This is Louisa, known to her wide circle of undesirable friends as Lousy.”

  “How do you do?” said Nigel to the girl who sat in an ungainly attitude upon a kitchen chair, stark naked. She glowered at him through a tangle of hair.

  “Bloody cold, as you ask me,” she vouchsafed.

  Whether it was the north light, or the east wind outside that seeped into the room with a bone-piercing chill for which the ancient gas-fire was no match, the girl’s skin had a blueish tone.

  “Who’s this?” she growled.

  “His name is Nigel Strangeways,” said Walt. “He lives with Clare Massinger.”

  A trace of animation appeared upon the girl’s doughy face.

  “Clare Massinger? She’s old hat now.”

  “You shut your silly mouth, Lousy. Massinger is first class. What the hell do you know about it, anyway?”

  “Peter says——”

  “Peter knows as much about plastic values as this bit of linoleum.” Bending down, Walt tore a strip off the rotting linoleum and slapped the girl smartly on the thigh with it. “If you’d use your own eyes instead of bleating out a lot of second-hand judgments——”

  “When you’ve finished,” she complained.

  “I have finished. Put on your clothes and remove the body. This gentleman wants to talk to me.”

  “One of your Establishment friends, huh?” The girl stood up, revealing the stocky, broad-hipped figure, the thick legs and low-slung buttocks beloved by painters. “I warned you what’d happen to your work if you got in with that lot. Peter says——”

  “——Peter!”

  The girl put her hands on her hips, tossing back her hair and revealing a dirty neck. “All right. Marry your bloody heiress—and Annigoni won’t see you for dust.”

  “I do believe this moronic cow is trying to be rude,” remarked Walt. He seized the solid girl and held her up high, her legs kicking like a frog’s, then deposited her among her clothes on the bed.

  “She needs her bottom smacked. You take first go?” Walt grinned at Nigel, wandering off to the easel. “Colour,” he muttered abstractedly. “That’s all very well. But you’ve got to feel it! Here!” He thumped his barrel chest. “Young Lousy—does she make you feel any colour?”

  “She looks blue to me,” said Nigel.

  “Nah. That’s just her bad circulation. Her father’s a chartered accountant, believe it or not. . . . Figure studies. . . . She’s in revolt against bourgeois respectability, or some such crap, so she sits for me and goes daubing in some goddamned art school. Pathetic, isn’t it?” He scraped away at the canvas with his palette-knife. “Louisa, the queen of the layabouts. . . . But you mark my words, she’ll end up in a semi-detached in the suburbs, like the rest of them. Nappies in the bathroom and a loverly three-piece suite in the lounge.”

  “——to that,” mumbled the subject of his remarks, drawing a thick sweater over her head.

  “Yeah, she’s burning with a hard, gem-like flame—like a lodging-house gas-jet. Just look at her! All rump and no radiance. Dare say Massinger could make something of her. But I need someone who’ll squeeze the colours out of me—get it?——a model who’s asking for vermilion and cobalt and chrome-yellow. Poor Lousy gives off about as much passionate colour as a loin of refrigerated mutton.”

  “If you could paint like you talk,” retorted the girl, “you’d be in the Academy.”

  “Hah! Double-barrelled insult. You kill me. Run along now, Cleopatra. See you to-morrow.”

  “So long,” said Louisa amiably, and with a final glare at Nigel, departed.

  “Well, there it is,” muttered Walt. “Lar Vee Bohame. She can have it. Cup of tea?”

  He unearthed a plate of buns from under a paint-rag, filled a kettle, lit the gas ring.
Nigel studied the young painter’s cannon-ball head, compact body and neat movements.

  “Well,” said Walt as he poured out the tea, “how’s things in the great world of crime and punishment? Found any more bodies?”

  “Rebecca’s very upset.”

  A wary look came into Walter’s bright blue eyes. “She sent you up here?”

  “No.”

  “Well then? You on the Marriage Guidance lark? Have a bun.”

  “I can’t make out whether you’ve broken it off with her or not. Have you?”

  “What does she say?”

  “That she hasn’t seen you for two days. And what do you say?”

  “That I haven’t seen her for two days. So what? I don’t have to live in her pocket.”

  “You’ll beat up two newspapermen who molest her, but you won’t stand by her when she’s in real trouble?”

  “I beat them up because journalists disgust me—it wasn’t my chivalry.” Walt’s round head rolled on his shoulders. “Hey, what’s this you said? Real trouble? How d’you mean?”

  Nigel gazed at him non-committally, saying nothing.

  “You mean they suspect her of doing the old man?” Walt persisted.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Me? It’s nothing to do with me.” The piercing blue eyes stared defiantly at Nigel, then swivelled away.

  “You know, somebody ought to sign you on for the freaks’ show in a fair.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Young man who says it’s nothing to do with him when he suspects his fiancée is a murderess.”

  “Look here, I——”

  “Is that why you’re pulling out? Afraid of her?”

  “This is just bloody crazy!”

  “Or am I really expected to believe you had a change of heart and decided that a rich wife would be bad for your—” Nigel glanced at a greyish still-life on the wall— “your Art.”

  “I shall probably knock your block off before you go. But I’d like to know first why you find that idea so incredible.”

  “I don’t. It’s perfectly possible a rich wife might be the ruin of you. What I do find odd is that this should only have occurred to you a couple of days ago. The day after Rebecca’s father disappeared, you came chasing round to ask me how soon you and Rebecca could get your hands on to his money. What happened in the interval?”