A Lover Too Many

by Roy Lewis

  And if he wanted a good secretary, he could rely on Joan to join him.

  The thought was a stupid one. He could never employ Joan now.

  He rose and walked through to the outer office. Joan had gone. It was unlike her, really, to leave before he did, without first popping her head round the door to discover if there was anything urgent he required, and if not to wish him good night.

  But there were reasons for her conduct now.

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked down the stairs. As he came down he heard voices below, at the entrance to the building. When he came into sight of the door he found himself looking at John Sainsby’s back. He had just taken leave of someone. A client, probably.

  Then, as Peter approached the doorway, John turned. His face was pale, his mouth loose with worry. He gave a start of surprise as he saw Peter.

  ‘Oh! I didn’t hear you coming, Peter.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  John Sainsby nodded quickly and nervously. He forced a ghastly half-smile to his narrow features.

  ‘Of course. You just leaving?’

  Peter nodded, his eyes on the street. There was a man crossing from Green Street into the High. It was an unmistakable figure: tall, thin, with a domed head. What had Inspector Crow been talking to John Sainsby about?

  ‘You don’t look well, John. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  The answer was too quick and too jerky.

  Peter eyed him with concern.

  ‘Why don’t you join me for a drink? We could walk along to the Bull: it’ll be open by the time we get there, and a bit of fresh air, followed by a stiff whisky, will do us both good.’

  Sainsby hesitated. Then, impulsively, he said, ‘I think that’s a good idea. Let’s go.’

  As they walked along the High Street there was little opportunity to talk. The pavement was crowded. Once or twice John was forced to move on ahead and Peter observed that some of the precision of his walk seemed to have deserted him.

  ‘It’s a long time since I found myself the first customer of the evening in a pub,’ Peter said as he placed the whisky and lime in front of his companion. He was thinking that it was a curiously effeminate drink that John had asked for. But it was not treated effeminately: John swallowed it in a quick gulp. Peter stared.

  ‘The evening will be an expensive one,’ he grinned.

  ‘I trust you feel better?’ Sainsby smiled lopsidedly.

  ‘I’ll get a couple more,’ he said, and left for the bar. When he returned, he seemed to have regained some of his normal composure.

  ‘I imagine you’ll have received the notice of dissolution of the partnership, Peter.’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  Sainsby shrugged unhappily.

  ‘I’m only sorry that I couldn’t do anything about it. The old man was adamant. Not that it matters anyway.’

  ‘From which I gather that you’re still thinking about this Bar nonsense.’

  ‘Not nonsense, Peter. Not thinking, either. Decided.’

  Peter sipped his drink thoughtfully.

  ‘I think you’re nuts. The practice is going well. Stephen will retire in a few years, if not sooner. Depending on his political kites. You’ll be senior partner, with a couple of juniors. And you’re thinking of giving it up—’

  ‘Decided.’

  ‘All right, you’ve decided to give it up for a career at the Bar. You know what you’re doing? Hell, it means you’ve got to read for Bar finals to start with, and you’ve not done any academic law since law school. That’s going to take a year at least: I trust I’m not being over-sanguine! And then there’s pupillage — and although there’s more work around these days for the barrister who’s just starting his career, it still costs money while you work for the exams and devil for your senior. It can be a long haul. And while you’re reasonably well known around here, you know damn’ well there are no chambers in the vicinity, and you’ll have to make new contacts and all that — you’re nuts, John. Think it over.’

  Sainsby shook his head.

  ‘No. I know what I’m doing. Things . . .’ He looked at Peter oddly for a moment, as though he were about to say something. He checked himself.

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ he insisted stubbornly.

  Conversation was desultory thereafter.

  Peter wanted to ask why John had been talking with Crow — the inspector couldn’t have spent more than fifteen minutes with Joan, which meant that he must have been closeted with John for almost half an hour. What had they discussed? Peter couldn’t think how he could tactfully broach the subject. Sainsby obviously had his problems, and Peter certainly had his. He saw John and himself objectively for a moment: two young men sitting in a pub staring at morose glasses of whisky. They were doing each other no good at all. Sainsby obviously recognised it too.

  ‘Got to be going,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Oh, by the way, can you get across to the Holford firm next Tuesday evening? They want one of us along for their annual meeting.’

  ‘Remind me tomorrow, John. I should be able to make it. I’ve nothing to keep me at home.’

  ‘Er . . . no,’ said Sainsby nervously.

  ‘Well, I’ll . . . er . . . see you.’

  When he’d gone there was only the whisky and his own thoughts. The whisky had already landed him in trouble. Peter left and walked back to the office, and his car.

  He took the longer route home, and stopped off at the country club on the way, for a meal. Jeannette had spent more than a few evenings here — with him and without him. When she was there alone he had always picked her up. She had driven no car: she had liked to be driven.

  By eight-fifteen he was home. The evening stretched ahead of him and the house was quiet. He tried to read for a while: the Solicitor’s Gazette first, and then a novel he found in the dining-room. Jeannette had borrowed it from the library. They hadn’t yet asked for its return.

  He found himself unable to concentrate.

  His thoughts kept returning to Inspector Crow. Why had the man found it necessary to see Shirley — and then himself? All right, he was new to the investigation — but why question them like this? It could only mean that in some way suspicion was falling on Peter Marlin, and the motive for murder was Shirley. It was a repeat of the suspicion that had been immediate, after the murder. The local police had seemed almost to assume, without bothering to look farther, that he had been, at the least, involved. It was only when his whereabouts at the time of the murder had become known that they had started to look elsewhere.

  But now Inspector Crow was following the same pattern. Jeannette — and Peter and Shirley.

  It was all patently absurd. But logical. Peter got up and prowled around the house.

  ‘It was of no consequence.’

  But it had been. Jeannette’s going had been agony: her unexplained absence had been hell: her return had been a searing relief and yet a problem in itself.

  Where had she been? With whom had she stayed? Inspector Crow’s words seemed to have implied that the police had checked and discovered her whereabouts during that period. Or did they?

  He found himself in Jeannette’s room.

  When she had come back she had insisted on using the spare room at the front, fitted out with some new bedroom furniture, and a desk, and typewriter. She had dabbled, unsuccessfully, at short-story writing for women’s magazines. The spare room; Jeannette’s room . . . Potter had said that they had lived together reasonably amicably. They had. That was about the only way it could be described, the way they had lived after her return.

  He opened her wardrobe. Her clothes were still there. It was as though she were still alive, and when he put his hand in the pocket of her coat it was with a quickened pulse as though she might walk in through the door and catch him in his action. His degrading action.

  For he wanted to know, suddenly. Where she had been. Whom she had seen.
>
  But the coat told him nothing. Nor did the rest of her clothes. The police had been through the lot, anyway. And yet, as he remembered, not closely. They had gone over the sitting-room very carefully, and yet when he returned to the house he had received the impression that elsewhere their examination of the rooms had been cursory, desultory.

  Peter found himself thinking about Jeannette’s desk. It was Victorian, and its ornate carving contained a hidden drawer of the kind so loved by the Victorian paterfamilias. Had the police checked that drawer? Had they asked him about the desk? If they had, he couldn’t remember. Was it possible that the drawer had been overlooked?

  It couldn’t have been. When he inspected the desk he found marks, scratches on the flamboyant bosses. The hidden drawer had been opened — but not with a key. He pushed the polished oak boss aside to expose the keyhole.

  He paused. Jeannette had had a key, but he had not seen it since her death. If the police knew about the drawer they would have used the key — if they had found it — or they would have asked him about it. They hadn’t asked.

  The police would not have forced the drawer.

  He stared at the scratches then slowly put down one hand and dragged open the drawer — it had a spring activation normally, when opened with a key, but the spring was now broken and obstructing the drawer. Inside, a jumble of paper in an untidy heap. Nothing of any consequence.

  Peter stared at it dully. His mind was a blank. He began to push the drawer back, slowly, against the obstructive spring. The drawer refused to move back. Carefully he withdrew it completely and scrabbled to remove the broken spring, then peered into the aperture. There was a small packet at the back, where it had fallen down behind the drawer.

  He took it into the sitting-room and stared at it for a long time. It consisted of three letters, taped flatly together.

  Finally, he read them.

  When he put them down, he felt physically sick.

  It was some time before he found himself able to go to the telephone. He heard the ringing sound three times only before the receiver was lifted.

  ‘Shirley? This is Peter. I . . . I think I know who murdered Jeannette.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Shirley stared helplessly at Peter Marlin, as he sat nervously on the edge of the settee. His entrance to her house this evening had been in marked contrast to his last appearance; this time he had been distraught, upset, hesitant and quite unlike the brash, drunken young man who had intruded recently.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’

  When he had spoken to her on the telephone she had been unable to quell the sudden quickening of her pulse at the sound of his voice. Perhaps she would never be able to quell it. Shirley had thought that she could get over the havoc that Peter had caused in her previously ordered existence, she’d thought that she had got over it. Until he had reappeared that evening, drunk, falling about the place. She had been as contemptuous of her own emotions that evening as she had been of him, and for that reason she had spoken cuttingly to him. He had got the message then, and yet he seemed to have turned to her now that he had discovered the letters.

  She held them in her hand. Impatiently, Peter blurted out, ‘Well, don’t you think I’m right?’

  She shook her head in despair.

  ‘Really, Peter, I don’t know. I can understand the shock that these letters must have been. I — I gather that you had no idea that—’

  ‘I had no idea,’ he agreed grimly.

  She saw a sudden shadow pass over his face as he looked at her and realised intuitively that he was remembering that while he could feel pain now at the thought that his wife had had a lover, he himself was in no position to criticise. People in glass houses . . .

  Shirley bit her lip. Such thoughts were dangerous. What was past was past. She thrust the letters at him.

  ‘I don’t know, Peter. These letters show, quite obviously, that Jeannette had a lover. They show that she stayed with him for part of the time when she left you. They show that the whole thing had more or less died when she returned to you.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘There’s more to it than that,” he insisted stubbornly. ‘Look at it like this. Jeannette meets this man — even invites him to a party at our house. Of that, incidentally, I’m pretty sure. The name is familiar, and I’m sure I’ve met him. However, an . . . an affair develops, and a little later she leaves me and goes to live with him. She probably adopted an assumed name, and he set her up somewhere . . . anyway, it’s not important, the details, I mean. The fact is that eventually, he got tired of her.’

  ‘Or she of him,’ Shirley added quietly. ‘She did come back to you, Peter.’

  The set of his jaw distressed her; she didn’t like to see him hurt.

  ‘No. He tired of her. She came back to me only because it was the easiest thing to do. He gave her what she wanted — and she still wanted it. A fast life, a good time. When it wasn’t available, she came back. That’s all.’

  He knew that Jeannette had not come back because she wanted to return to him.

  ‘All right, you say he tired of her.’

  ‘Yes. But though Jeannette came back home, she wasn’t going to be put off so easily. She still wanted him. And I think she began to put pressure on him. The tone of that last dated letter tells us that. It tells us more. Let me read this to you — you must have skipped it—’

  It was quite possible that she had. The first letter she had read with a curious detachment; its endearments had surprised, then shocked her in their intensity. The man with whom Jeannette had lived had not been averse to graphic descriptions of their affair, and of their feelings, physical and emotional.

  The first two letters had made Shirley feel embarrassed, as though she were peering into other people’s lives. The last letter she had read only cursorily.

  ‘I won’t deal with all of it,’ said Peter. ‘But just listen to this: “. . . darling, what you suggest is impossible. I must insist that it ends now. It was fun, we had a marvellous time, I took as much delight in your body as you did in mine, but it is all now over. I cannot see you again, I’ve no intention of taking up where we left off. As for the other suggestions you make, they’re too damn’ ludicrous, and I strongly advise you not to try them. I could always reply in kind of course, but I’m also aware that I’ve a damn’ sight more to lose than you do. So I’m not going to reply in kind — I’m just going to give you a warning. Don’t try it on. You do, and I’ll break your sweet bloody neck. I’ve no intention of being hooked like this and I would much prefer that we should have pleasant memories of our encounters, than that it should all end by my being forced to do things to you that I should hate to do to any woman—”’

  Peter stopped reading and looked up at her. His dark eyes were restless.

  ‘You see what had happened?’ he asked. ‘He’d broken it off. She came back to me. But she still wanted him and she wrote to him, asking him to take her back. It’s obvious that he refused, so she then told him that if their relationship was not to be continued she’d tell his wife about what had been going on. That’s what he means about “having a damn’ sight more to lose“ — he’s a rich man, but a lot of his backing is his wife’s, and his reputation would suffer anyway if his sordid little affair became public knowledge.’

  Shirley couldn’t meet his eyes. She wondered if that was how Peter now looked upon the time that she and he had had together, during the months of Jeannette’s absence. A sordid little affair.

  ‘It never did become public knowledge. Jeannette must have written to him, or phoned him or something, to say that she intended to expose him in spite of his threats. So he stopped her talking.’

  ‘That’s going too far, Peter. You’re introducing fancy in place of logic.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Look, Shirley, it fits. Can’t you see? He was desperate. Jeannette was pressing him. He came down — perhaps he was intending just to remonstrate with her, but when they met at the house perhaps
Jeannette made him angry with her insistence.’

  ‘Peter—’

  ‘Perhaps he got violent and there was a struggle. He killed her. Then he realised that she might have some of his letters in her possession. He saw the desk, examined it, discovered the secret drawer and forced it. I suspect that he found a bundle of his letters and took them, overlooking these, which had fallen to the back of the desk. Then he left, fairly secure in thinking that there was nothing to connect them.’

  Shirley took out a cigarette and lit it slowly. Pete’s face was drained of colour. She regarded him calmly.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said quietly, ‘do you really think that Jeannette was in love with this man?’

  ‘I do,’ he argued stubbornly.

  ‘She was so in love with him that she was prepared to break up her marriage — and his? Even though he didn’t want her?’

  Peter looked at his hands, clenched on his knee. When he replied, his voice was strained.

  ‘I think she was. I think it had become an overriding passion for her. Let me put you right on something, Shirley. After she returned, we didn’t live together . . . as man and wife. We had a difficult, strained relationship, an uneasy one. She often seemed preoccupied; she was out a great deal. I thought it was her natural reluctance, or inability, to settle immediately, after being away for so long. I realise now that I just didn’t understand what was going on.’

  He rose and walked across the room slowly, without looking at Shirley.

  ‘We had lived together, she had been my wife. But I didn’t know her, I couldn’t have known her. Or I’d have guessed what was going on. I didn’t guess. I suppose it’s impossible to know another person well enough . . .’

  ‘You can’t get inside another person’s head,’ said Shirley quietly.

  ‘No,’ Peter agreed. ‘I realise that I didn’t know what she was thinking about, or who she was thinking about. I should have recognised the signs, nevertheless. It doesn’t matter anyway, not now. Perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference, even then. The fact is, Jeannette is dead.’