by John Creasey
Copyright & Information
Murder, London - Miami
First published in 1969
© John Creasey Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1969-2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of John Creasey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2014 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN EAN Edition
0755123883 9780755123889 Print
0755133919 9780755133918 Kindle
0755134311 9780755134311 Epub
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
John Creasey – Master Storyteller - was born in Surrey, England in 1908 into a poor family in which there were nine children, John Creasey grew up to be a true master story teller and international sensation. His more than 600 crime, mystery and thriller titles have now sold 80 million copies in 25 languages. These include many popular series such as Gideon of Scotland Yard, The Toff, Dr Palfrey and The Baron.
Creasey wrote under many pseudonyms, explaining that booksellers had complained he totally dominated the 'C' section in stores. They included:
Gordon Ashe, M E Cooke, Norman Deane, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday, Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton, J J Marric, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson, Anthony Morton and Jeremy York.
Never one to sit still, Creasey had a strong social conscience, and stood for Parliament several times, along with founding the One Party Alliance which promoted the idea of government by a coalition of the best minds from across the political spectrum.
He also founded the British Crime Writers' Association, which to this day celebrates outstanding crime writing. The Mystery Writers of America bestowed upon him the Edgar Award for best novel and then in 1969 the ultimate Grand Master Award. John Creasey's stories are as compelling today as ever.
1
THE JEALOUS MAN
“If he comes here again,” David Marshall said, “I’ll kill him.”
He sat strangely still, his face young for his forty years, but his expression that of an ageing, bitter, vengeful man.
It hurt Henrietta to look at him, and her hurt was made worse by the hopeless knowledge that there was no reason in what he said, no reason at all, only an anguish of emotion which she could see but could not understand.
“I mean it,” David said. “I’ll kill him.”
He watched her, expecting her to speak, waiting on her words.
The David whom she had first known – he had been so essentially ‘Sir David Marshall’ then, remote and almost awesome – would have used his mind to listen to her, would have been wholly reasonable and objective, but over the last few months his objectivity had nearly gone, and, in a chilling way, Henrietta suspected that she was the cause of its going.
She had done something to this man she so respected and admired. She had, without intention and at first without realising, caught and entrapped him, and no matter what she tried to do now she could not set him free.
“All you do is sit there,” he said, piqued by her lack of response. “Why can’t you say something? I’ve just told you that I’m going to kill your lover.”
She was stirred to protest, not yet to anger.
“You know very well he is not my lover.”
“I know you say he’s not.”
“I’m not going over that again,” she said wearily. “I have no lover. I’ve never had a lover.”
She was thirty-one, and she told the truth.
“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly. “You’re far too attractive never to have had a lover.”
“David,’ she said, ignoring the remark, “I think you ought to go away for a holiday.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said quickly. “So that he can come to my house, make love to my secretary—”
“David,” Henrietta interrupted, her tone icy, “I am beginning to dislike you very much.”
It wasn’t true; it was only his moods she disliked. Now she saw that she had hurt more than she had intended, and longed to take back the words.
He sat upright, squaring his shoulders.
“Yes. You do dislike me, don’t you?” His voice was brisker. “Let’s have the truth – you love him, don’t you?”
“Whether I love him or anybody else is my affair,” Henrietta made herself say. “If you were in a different mood, you’d be the first to say so.”
“So we’re back at that again. You work for me, your private life is no business of mine. You seem to have forgotten how close we’ve grown to each other – how much of a confidante you’ve become – how much I rely on you, need you.”
She made no comment.
“It’s always the same,” he went on. “One minute you seem to be really fond of me – the next you’re like a block of ice. But then how could you be fond of me,” he added bitterly, “when we both have such different backgrounds? I mustn’t forget that, must I? My culture is only acquired; yours is due to breeding.”
“David,” Henrietta said desperately, “please don’t go on like this.”
He pushed his chair back and stood up.
Sometimes, when he did that, it meant the end of the discussion; that he had decided it was safer to be alone, and nurse himself back to a mood that was at least bearable. The pattern of the past year had become very set; in half an hour or more, sometimes less, he would come into her room and say something so warmed with humility that she would melt towards him, and they would talk on entirely different lines, he pouring his heart and his confidences out to her, she wanting desperately to help him. She would forget, again, that he would misunderstand, that he would want to take her in his arms, yearning to love and be loved.
Until he realised she did not want these things.
What he did not, could not, understand was that she wanted them with no man.
Oh, how silly it was, how crazy it was – and at times how deadly it seemed, and how hopeless.
Did he want her to go back to her room?
If not, then he would walk about the study, trying to argue himself out of the mood, drawing closer to her, until at last he would take her hands in his. He would expect her to yield, to forget the angry things he had said, and to reassure him.
He stepped to the window and stood looking out on to the smooth, velvety lawn, some roses beginning to bud, some beds of antirrhinums not yet in full bloom, and neat paths of yellow gravel. Beyond was a high wall of mellowed brick. This was one of the few genuine Queen Anne properties left in Chelsea, between the quiet river and the bustle of Kings Road. The house itself was small; David lived upstairs and worked downstairs, and before these moods had seized him they had usually lunched together in the kitchen, after his d
aily help had gone.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” he asked abruptly.
“What don’t I believe?”
“That if Ward comes here again, I’ll kill him.”
“Of course I don’t believe it.”
Without looking round, yet with a change in tone which told her what change had come in his expression, he said, “Keep him away. Because I mean it.”
In that moment there was no doubt at all; he meant exactly what he said. The realisation made Henrietta feel a sudden fear, but also anger. What right had David to say such things to her? She spent so many hours here, dedicated to working for him. She liked the work, at times she loved it, but she could not give him every hour of every day. Oh, how absurd it was! If Gerry called for her and she wasn’t ready, then she would ask him in. Not to be able to do so would be intolerable. But if she said this now, what would David do? In his present mood, she could not be sure.
But already her anger was fading; already she was anxious only to help him. Time and time again she told herself that she must not let him get away with such accusations, that he would take her compassion – and it was compassion – for weakness. She should be stronger, but such was not her kind of strength.
He was watching her now, eyes burning.
“Do you understand?” he asked harshly.
“David,” she said quietly, “what’s upset you so much today?”
“Do you understand?” he asked again.
She hesitated.
She did not know that, when he was in such a mood as this, she nearly drove him mad. Her stillness, the unwinking gaze of her beautiful blue eyes, her almost bird-like alertness – all of these things affected him; but she did not know.
“Yes,” she said. “I understand perfectly well.”
He drew nearer, until he stood only a few feet away from her, quite motionless. She did not like the way he stared; he was different from his usual self, even at his most difficult. He seemed almost a stranger. Yet she had worked for him for rather more than six years and known him – or believed she had known him – for three. In those early aloof days, when she had no reason to suspect that he was anything but happy, loving his wife, he had been a stranger. Although she had respected and at times even liked him, she had never felt that she had known the real man. But for the past three years she had come to believe she was familiar with all his moods, and this different one was almost sinister.
She was deeply troubled.
Usually, it was he who would come towards her. In moments when he seemed to be frozen, incapable of moving or relaxing, he would suddenly wilt, despair would show in his eyes, and he would come to her for comfort and for solace, holding her tightly, fiercely, as if he dared not let her go. And she would coax him into talking, into telling her what had worried him.
Only once before had she seen him look as he looked now: that had been the first time, the very first time, he had talked. Then, he had sat behind his big, red-topped desk, she sitting opposite him.
“What is worrying you?” she had ventured to ask at last.
“You don’t know, do you?” he had answered.
“No,” she had said.
“I’ve hidden it from you completely, then?”
“Hidden what from me?”
“Henrietta,” he had said, “my wife is mad.”
It had been a very great shock to her. There had always been something a little different about Yolande, of course, times when she was over-excited, times when she stayed in her room for days on end, seeing no one; but Henrietta had not thought about it deeply, her interest then had been so much more in the work and the man rather than in his private life. She had only an acquaintance with Yolande – his blonde, unbelievably selfish wife. It had never occurred to her that she and Yolande could ever have anything in common, and David’s home life was something quite remote from her, even though she worked in his home.
His expression at the time he had told her had been exactly as it was now, and she could remember his words vividly.
“Henrietta – my wife is mad.”
It was true; literally true, she had learned.
Psychiatrists had tried to help Yolande, but every kind of treatment had failed, and now she was in a private nursing home, a luxury place where she was well cared for, and from whence – if David told the truth and Henrietta had never known him lie – she did not wish to come.
“She’s happier there,” he said, occasionally.
Gradually, Henrietta had come to learn how lonely he had been for so many years, hiding the fact of his wife’s insanity from the world. Gradually, too, certain facts had emerged: that it was because of this that there had been no children; that Yolande had been aware of the mad streak in her, but that he, David, had not known of it until after their marriage.
“And when I did know of it,” he said, “I came to hate her.”
“David, don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”
“But you and I have a pact,” he had said through his pain. “We tell the truth to each other. Don’t you remember? Am I to lie to you because you don’t like a certain aspect of the truth?”
And she had admitted, “No, of course not,” and added, “I just wish it weren’t true.”
Then after a pause, searching her heart and mind to find something to say which would give him courage, she had added again, “But I can understand it.”
He had laughed, as if genuinely amused.
“You – understand hate? You couldn’t hate anyone if you tried all your life.”
“But intellectually I can understand it,” she insisted.
“Ah, yes. Understand but not feel it. I hope to God you never know what hatred feels like, Henrietta.”
Then he had started to talk of the little daily hurts of his years with Yolande, of the effort of hiding the truth about her, of trying to help her, of suffering so much in silence.
Now, he looked exactly as he had looked that day three years ago, when he had told her how he had learned to hate.
At that moment, at half past six in the evening of a pleasant day in June, a man turned into Bell Street, Chelsea, not half a mile away from Sir David Marshall’s home. His was a smaller but self-contained house in a street which was much more suburban than those around it. He had lived there for nearly twenty years.
His wife was weeding the narrow flowerbed round the small lawn as he drove into the garage. She stood up and went towards him, both deriving obvious pleasure from the familiar meeting.
The man was Superintendent Roger West of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard.
2
THE ANGRY WOMAN
Henrietta studied David’s features intently and felt what she had come to feel more often than ever in her life: tenderness. She wanted to comfort him, to ease the tension he was feeling, but did not know how best to do it. Recollection of that first moment of confidence, when he had told her that his wife was mad, had clouded her mind – but now it was clear again.
The certain thing was that she could not accept this situation, could not allow him to dictate such terms to her. Once she did so, he would dominate her absolutely, and she knew that he had great strength of will. He stood unmoving, unyielding, in front of her, until again she asked.
“David, what has upset you? Please tell me.”
“You’ve upset me,” he answered flatly.
“I certainly didn’t mean to.”
“I couldn’t have made it plainer that I don’t want that man in my house.”
“You know – you’re absurd,” Henrietta said with a sudden spurt of anger. She saw the set of his jaw, but went on, “There isn’t the slightest need for you to make all this fuss! I can’t keep him, or anyone else, on the doorstep when they call for me.”
“He
doesn’t have to call for you,” David said.
There was going to be no reasoning with him; the moment had come to recognise that. It hurt, because it was so unfair and unreasonable, but David was David and it was useless to try to force him out of this sort of mood. It passed through her mind that one day she would have to get another job – but the thought passed; it was practically unthinkable that, while he needed her, she would ever leave him.
“Can’t we talk about this again tomorrow?” she asked. “You really ought to sign those letters.”
“They can wait,” he said.
“But you said—”
“They can wait,” he repeated irritably.
“Don’t let’s argue any more,” she pleaded, “I’m so tired.”
“You wouldn’t be tired if he were coming,” David flashed.
Quite suddenly, reason deserted her and anger surged out of control. Night after night she worked late, Saturdays and Sundays she would work if need be, reading and researching until she felt that her head would split with concentration. Last night was the first for over a week that she had left by half past six – and even then she had kept Gerry waiting for nearly an hour, kicking his heels and getting more and more annoyed.
“Trying to cope with you in this mood would make anyone tired,” she said sharply. “I’ll go and get the letters.”
She turned on her heel and stalked towards the door which led to her room, an annexe of David’s study. She reached the door and pulled it open, hearing no sound – but suddenly David’s hands fell on to her shoulders and he spun her round.
“Henrietta – don’t ever run out on me.”
She felt the pressure of his fingers very tight on her shoulders – and his thumbs and forefingers were very near her neck. His eyes had a glitter which she had never seen in them before. She did not move, but spoke with restrained tension.