by L. C. Tyler
‘The dustmen woke me up,’ said Elsie thoughtfully. ‘If it had just been dropped in with the kitchen waste, it could be under several feet of landfill by now.’
‘Or the river is very close by,’ I added. ‘I have no doubt the police will have thought of both possibilities.’
‘I . . .’ said Elsie, and then stopped in her tracks. We were no longer alone on the terrace. Herbert (‘call me Herbie’) Proctor had joined us.
Proctor made less noise as he moved around than almost anyone I have ever met. His size seven feet must have been encased in the softest-soled shoes around. He was also of a height not to attract attention. His five foot five (or six) frame made him inconspicuous in the hotel bar or elsewhere. His clothes seemed chosen for their lack of identifiable style or character – today it was stone-coloured moleskin trousers, a cream shirt and a slightly faded, green, zipped fleece. I wondered how long he had been standing there before we noticed him.
‘What do they charge for a coffee out here?’ he asked. ‘I’m not paying extra just to drink it in the freezing cold.’
‘It’s free,’ I said, ‘like the lunch. So long as we are obliged to stay here, the hotel has offered not to charge.’
‘Lunch was free?’ muttered Proctor. I remembered that he had been absent from the dining room. ‘Well, somebody might have told me. Is dinner free too?’
‘I assume so,’ I said. ‘If we’re all still here.’
‘I’ll eat double at dinner, then,’ he said, with a sort of grim determination. He deposited himself, uninvited, in a chair at our table. ‘Well, what were you two young people talking about?’
‘About the death of two of the hotel guests,’ I said. ‘Like everyone else here, probably.’
‘And what have the police got to say about that?’ he asked.
‘They have revealed very little,’ I replied cautiously. ‘To me at least.’
‘They ought to let us all go,’ said Proctor. ‘It’s obviously none of the guests who did it.’
‘Why are you so sure?’ I asked.
‘Well, if it is, then it makes even less sense keeping us all cooped up here so the murderer can pick us off one by one. But it’s much more likely that it’s somebody from outside. Or one of the staff.’
‘Do you know something that we don’t?’ I asked.
Proctor smiled and tapped his nose. ‘You’d be surprised what Herbie Proctor finds out,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I doubt any of these stamp collectors would be up to murder. Pathetic bunch.’ He raised an eyebrow, asking us to share this low estimation of the hotel guests.
‘Pathetic bunch? You mean your fellow philatelists?’ I enquired.
He looked blank and then said: ‘Oh, right, yeah.’
‘You think that stamp collecting is a rather sad pastime, perhaps?’
‘No, not at all,’ said Proctor, with a gleam in his eye. ‘At least we stamp collectors get out and meet people – not like being a crime writer, scribbling away on your own.’ He grinned at me. ‘There – you didn’t think I knew you were an author, did you? People always underestimate me at their cost. Well, I’ll tell you, not a lot escapes Herbie’s attention. Only met you a day or two ago, but I bet I could tell you plenty about yourself. Actually, I’m a bit of a fan of yours – I like the Buckford novels – though I always think your Sergeant Fairfax is a bit hard on private detectives.’
‘Fairfax believes that crime is the business of the police and nobody else. So do I, as it happens. And you’re a bit off target as far as crime writers are concerned – we are actually quite a sociable bunch.’
Proctor was unimpressed. He seemed to have a fairly low opinion of humanity generally and was not prepared to be surprised or to give crime writers the benefit of the doubt on my say-so alone.
‘You haven’t thought of writing a novel about a private eye, then, Ethelred?’ he continued.
‘No,’ I said.
‘It’s not just the police who can pick up clues, Ethelred.’
‘Yes, Mr Proctor, I’m afraid that it is,’ I said. ‘That is precisely how it works in real life. A private investigator may be helpful in a divorce case or industrial espionage, but they wouldn’t have much to teach the police about murder.’
Proctor looked at me, clearly nettled. ‘You think so? Well, perhaps, I already know just a bit more about Gold’s and Davidov’s murders than the police do.’
‘So what do you know?’ asked Elsie.
Proctor looked from me to Elsie, then back to me. He smiled and tapped the side of his nose again. ‘That, boys and girls, would be telling. That really would be telling. Now, where do I get some of that lovely free coffee?’
I glanced over towards the door, where I had thought I noticed somebody a moment before. But if there had been a waiter there, he had gone now.
‘Try reception,’ I said. ‘They’ll tell you.’
He sniffed. ‘Might just do that,’ he said. ‘See you both later.’ And he silently slipped through the terrace door and was gone.
‘Well,’ said Elsie, ‘he can spot a writer at thirty paces all right.’
‘Hardly a difficult trick,’ I said. ‘He would have only had to overhear a few words between us at dinner or over breakfast. And if he checked my name in the hotel register a Google search would give him all the information he needed – there are all sorts of places that could have told him which names I write under. Five minutes’ research would have been enough.’
Elsie raised an eyebrow when I mentioned ‘Google’. One of her more pathetic running jokes is that I am still trying to get to grips with nineteenth-century technology, let alone twenty-first.
‘Still, he must have been interested enough in you to run the search,’ said Elsie, thoughtfully. ‘What does he do – other than pretend to collect stamps? Was he trying to tell us he was a private eye?’
‘I didn’t ask him,’ I said. ‘Nor do I plan to.’
‘Do you think he really does know anything we don’t?’ asked Elsie. ‘If so, I wonder who else he’s told, and whether that was wise?’
‘You have a very vivid imagination,’ I said.
It was about an hour later that the police sergeant found me in the sitting room.
‘I am afraid that you will all have to stay until at least tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘There seems to have been another attempted murder.’
‘Another one?’
‘A physician has been called for Mr Proctor. He too has been poisoned.’
Eleven
It was a pensive group of guests who gathered for tea in the echoing, baronial dining room. Though the hotel had gone to town in providing appealing sandwiches and yummy gateaux, few of us seemed to have much appetite. Possibly it was the weather, or possibly it was that two guests had recently been poisoned, one fatally. People picked at their food, pausing after each mouthful to see what would happen. Nobody was competing to be the first to try the nice cakes. We all checked what the others were eating and then watched them with more than casual interest.
I cut myself a modest second helping of Black Forest gateau, jiggled it around so that it almost fitted onto the plate, and rejoined Ethelred at our table.
The German family decided they had had enough and quit, the father nodding to Ethelred as they left.
‘You’d have thought Germans would have been keener on Black Forest gateau,’ I said. ‘It’s one of their better inventions, after all.’
Ethelred looked blank.
‘The German family,’ I repeated.
‘They’re not German,’ said Ethelred. ‘They’re Danish. He works at the Danish Embassy in Paris.’
‘Danish?’
‘I was talking to the father. They’re from Nykøbing.’
‘Nykøbing? That rings a bell. Wasn’t that where those rare stamps turned up?’
‘Possibly,’ said Ethelred.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said, through a mouthful of chocolate crumbs. ‘It was in a flea market in Nykøbing. How big is Nykøbin
g?’
‘Pretty small,’ said Ethelred. (Remember what I said about pub quizzes?) ‘Why?’
‘Well, that makes it a pretty big coincidence, doesn’t it?’
‘There were lots of stories in the newspaper. Some were about stamps, some were not. These people had to come from somewhere. Wasn’t there also one about a gem robbery in London? Does that make you a suspect because you live in Hampstead?’
‘London is a bit bigger than Nykøbing,’ I pointed out.
‘I’m not sure you’ve got the right place anyway,’ he said.
‘No, I’m sure it was Nykøbing – I remember the funny little line through the O.’
‘Possibly, but you have to remember that—’
‘What,’ I said, ‘if they had these puce things and were planning to sell them here before their ownership could be challenged in the courts? Or what if they were the original owners and had discovered—’
‘What you have to remember—’ said Ethelred interrupting me.
‘But,’ I said, re-interrupting Ethelred, ‘you have to admit that it’s possible.’
‘Even if what you said were true – and it’s unlikely for reasons that I have been trying to explain and that I won’t bore you with now – but even if what you said were true, it doesn’t explain two murders and an attempted poisoning.’
‘But the stamps were really valuable.’
‘Less valuable now there are three of them,’ said Ethelred, showing he had been paying some attention when I first told him about it.
‘But still valuable-ish,’ I persisted. I tried to un-delete stuff from my memory. Wasn’t a figure of a million dollars each quoted somewhere? I put this to Ethelred.
‘Granted,’ he said wearily. He looked like a man who had already had as many conversations about stamps as he was ever going to need.
‘What,’ I said, ‘if they were going to sell them to Davidov? He’s the sort who would have bought dodgy stamps with disputed ownership. He likes Czarist stuff. Didn’t the Czar rule Denmark once?’
‘That was Finland.’
‘Was it? OK, so what if he had the stamps in that envelope?’
‘So who murdered him? Not the nice Danish family.’
‘The original owner, maybe.’
‘Who must have also presumably have been Danish, and who is clearly not here.’
I saw the logic of this. But surely a stamp fair like this, with loads of collectors milling around, was exactly where you would try to flog a valuable stamp of possibly disputed ownership? And this would have been one of the first stamp fairs to take place after the stamps had changed hands.
‘No,’ said Ethelred. ‘Whoever has the stamps now could probably argue they had good title to them, even if they know they had been sold to them unintentionally. They wouldn’t try to flog them cheaply and illicitly. They would be better off going to court if they had to and then selling the stamps in an auction. Nothing this big has come onto the market for some time – there’s no knowing what a pair would fetch.’
‘How much roughly?’ I asked.
Ethelred sighed.
‘The Swedish treskilling yellow of 1855,’ he said, ‘last sold for a bit under three million Swiss francs. That’s the sort of price a unique specimen commands. The one-cent British Guiana black on magenta cost a million dollars – but that was back in 1980. Oddly, neither stamp is in what you could describe as great shape. There’s a story, by the way, that may be vaguely relevant to this case. A second British Guiana one-cent magenta surfaced in the 1920s. Arthur Hind, the owner of the first one, is said to have bought it and then to have used it to light his cigar. That way he preserved the value of his investment. Unique examples are the thing to have. Stamps like the Hawaiian Missionaries two cent – of which there are over a dozen – don’t make more than a fraction of that sort of price. Potentially the single Danish ten-kroner puce, so long as it was the only known specimen, was the most valuable of the lot. Ten kroner was a vast amount to pay for a stamp. It was probably intended for paying stamp duty rather than for postage – which is why it doesn’t always appear in the standard lists of valuable postage stamps. But even if there are now three of them, then whoever has the two from Nykøbing is still onto a good thing.’
‘Ethelred, I just asked roughly what it was worth.’
‘All you need to know is this,’ Ethelred said. ‘Somebody might have all sorts of motives for wanting to get hold of the Danish stamps. But I don’t think anyone would try to unload them here. And I don’t think anyone would kill for them.’
‘So what was in Davidov’s envelope then?’ I asked.
Ethelred opened his mouth as if to answer, then shut it again and just looked at me.
‘How would I know that?’ he eventually said.
* * *
It was almost dark out on the terrace, but I wanted to take one last look at the landscape before the light faded. I noted the line of the wall, the location of the policeman (flapping his arms to keep himself warm). I noted where the garden furniture was stacked up. I mentally measured the distance to the toilets in the hotel reception. Yes, this was, quite literally for once, going to be a piece of piss. Everything depended on the chocolate shop staying open until six.
I was about to retrace my steps to a warmer place, when Mr Brown emerged onto the terrace and also started to survey the wall. I had not really had a chance to talk to him and it seemed a good chance for me to extract a few nuggets of information, if he had any to reveal. I therefore engaged him in a bit of intellectual conversation.
‘It’s brass monkeys right enough,’ was my opening gambit.
‘Sorry? Yes, I hadn’t realized the Loire valley could be this cold in December.’ That seemed to be all the conversation he had for the moment. He bit a nail or two and looked at the wall, then at the policeman, then at the wall.
‘Even if you make a break for it,’ I said, ‘they’ll stop you at Caen. We’re all suspects.’
‘I know,’ he said. So we were thinking along similar lines then, though he wasn’t envisaging doing it in a Versace skirt and high heels or stopping off to buy chocolate truffles en route.
‘You weren’t planning on a long stay?’ I enquired.
‘I wasn’t planning on any stay at all. I’d driven up from Bordeaux. I was getting a bit tired so thought I’d rest up in Chaubord and make an early start this morning. I really needed to be in England round about now. If I’m delayed any longer it will be a disaster. I keep checking the map to see if I can shave half an hour off the journey, but in the end I’m going to miss the conference I was supposed to be at tomorrow.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said. Then as an afterthought I added: ‘What sort of conference?’
‘Pharmaceuticals,’ he said.
‘As in dangerous drugs?’ I asked.
‘Most drugs are dangerous if misused. We like to think they all have a beneficial effect if properly prescribed.’
I studied him. He was carrying the odd surplus pound, but looked strong enough to carry out an efficient stabbing. He potentially had access to a wide range of poisons. He might well be carrying some with him. It would be interesting to know what he had stashed away. Time to lob in a few trick questions, I reckoned.
‘I’ve got a bit of a headache – you wouldn’t have anything for it, I suppose?’
He gave a laugh. ‘Sorry – I’m afraid I don’t usually carry samples on business trips,’ he said. ‘I’m sure reception could find you some paracetamol.’
‘Maybe something a bit stronger than paracetamol?’ I said. ‘Know what I mean?’
He looked at me oddly. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘No drugs of any sort. The police have been through my bags and pretty well taken the car apart. If I had any illegal substances on me, I can assure you I would have been under arrest long ago. So, no – I have no drugs for sale or otherwise. You’ll have to wait until we get out of here for . . . whatever it is you want.’
Fine. He’s got me down as a smackhead.
‘Did you know either of the two murder victims?’ I asked.
‘How could I have done? The young guy was killed only a few hours after I checked in and Mr Denisov, or whatever he was called, died this morning. I hardly had a chance to speak to either of them.’
‘No interest in stamps?’
‘Strangely, yes, I have. I’ve collected them since I was five. But the stamp fair was pretty much over by the time I arrived.’
I switched the subject to the ten-kroner puce but he just looked blank. ‘I haven’t had much time to look at the papers,’ he said.
It seemed that it was going to be a fairly dull and uneventful evening.
Then I looked over Brown’s shoulder and saw, coming through the door, Herbie Proctor’s ghost.
Twelve
Men and women choose very different ways of getting themselves murdered. I will not pretend that my novels precisely reflect Home Office statistics for crime in England and Wales, but anyone embarking on a long string of fictitious killings should at least know something about the relative probabilities.
First, men are far more likely to get murdered than women. Anyone aiming for realism needs roughly twice as many male victims as female.
Women tend to be murdered by their partner or ex-partner. A justice system that automatically convicted the husband would get it right more than a third of the time. By far the majority of women who are murdered are killed by somebody who knows them well – if not by a husband, then by a devoted son or daughter. Often they are strangled.
Men, on the other hand, get out more and are likely – increasingly likely – to be killed by a stranger. Home is relatively safe for men. Wives, for some reason, murder husbands much less frequently than husbands murder wives. Less than ten per cent of murdered males meet their death at the hands of an enraged spouse, though ‘nagged to death’ does not for some reason seem to be a Home Office category.
Men are most likely to meet their deaths at the pointy end of some sharp instrument – stabbings of one sort or another account for around a third of male murders. Stabbing leads, however, by only a short head from death by fist or boot.