Murder of a Snob

by Roy Vickers

  She left him elated by her friendliness. The Chief Constable’s belief that one sought an affair with every girl one liked the look of, was, he decided, old-fashioned and absurd. There were lots of ways of liking attractive women. Lots of ways of admiring them. It was character that fascinated you. When a girl possessed enormous potentialities of good and evil all mixed up together—

  ‘O madre mia!’

  He put the damper on his imagination and drove to Fenchurch’s flat. He knocked and rang without result. He would have to go back to the Chief and say: ‘I couldn’t find Ralph, and I couldn’t find Fenchurch either’—and grin like an imbecile.

  After the third attempt on the door knocker, Benscombe was compelled to remind himself that Regulations were extremely clear on the subject of forcing an entry—equally clear in the matter of searching private premises without the owner’s consent.

  On the other hand, suppose one had a sort of open invitation from the owner? Suppose the owner had offered—as in fact Fenchurch had offered—to provide one with a latchkey. True, the offer had been in the nature of a bluff—but if the bluff had been called, Fenchurch would have handed over the latchkey, to save his face. It was, in a sense, a mere accident that the bluff had not been called, that the latchkey was not in his pocket—an accident whose effect could easily be neutralised.

  The police college, strangely enough, had provided instruction covering the next step.

  Inside the flat, Benscombe shut the front door and called Fenchurch by name. He repeated the call as he tapped on each door except the door of the owner’s bedroom, which was open.

  Having been brave enough to take the risk of a substantial setback to his career, he found that Fortune favoured him with almost suspicious alacrity. In a few minutes, evidence was positively shovelled upon him—evidence that was important enough to be unnerving. At the lowest assessment, it would save him from disciplinary action.

  On Fenchurch’s telephone he reported in detail to the Chief Constable.

  “You’ve destroyed the value of the evidence by forcing an entry.” Crisp’s voice was wintry. “Stay where you are. Put everything back where it was. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

  That, Benscombe thought, was a needless risk. He was wondering how to pass the twenty minutes, when Fenchurch himself walked into the studio.

  “Hul-lo! How perfectly splendid!” exclaimed Fenchurch. “But why did you dump your uniform?”

  “I had to go up to Town—”

  “It won’t really matter for the first sitting. It’s frightfully good of you to come. The light’s right for colour. If you’ll hop on the dais and get comfortable, I’ll have everything fixed in a few seconds.”

  Fenchurch flung off his coat, dropping it on the floor. There came a whirr and a rattle as the electric motor rolled and unrolled screens in the glass roof.

  “Look straight at my finger, will you … Chin the tiniest bit up. Good!”

  Benscombe had promised to sit for Fenchurch as lightly as Fenchurch had offered a latchkey. Yet the artist’s urgency now impacted upon him—almost banished memory of the Chief’s impending arrival.

  Benscombe could even feel a sitter’s self-consciousness.

  “My dear fellow, please don’t cook up an expression. Forget the easel and what I’m doing. Think of the murder. Finger prints! Clues! Flying Squad! Good! Hold the thought and the pose will hold itself. Keep as still as you can for a few minutes. Then we’ll have a short rest, if you feel you want it.”

  They had a rest of one minute. Benscombe was feeling that another was about due when he heard the door bell, followed by a knock that was indubitably Crisp’s.

  Fenchurch took not the slightest notice. The knocking was repeated.

  “I say, Fenchurch, there’s someone at your door.”

  “Never mind that!” snapped Fenchurch. Remembering that a measure of politeness was due to a voluntary model, he added: “I’ve trained myself not to hear when people knock. They soon go away.”

  The knocking stopped; but the Chief Constable did not go away. A couple of minutes later he opened the door of the studio.

  “Shut the door, please, and sit down somewhere,” said Fenchurch without looking from his easel. “We’re going to rest in a minute.”

  Crisp obeyed as if he were a social acquaintance who had dropped in for a chat. He sat behind Fenchurch where he could see the canvas—satisfied himself that here was an artist absorbed in his work.

  “You can talk to Benscombe if you like. It won’t disturb me.”

  “Thank you,” said Crisp. “Benscombe, I’ve got a warrant to search Mr. Fenchurch’s flat.”

  “Oh damn!” exclaimed Fenchurch, and stopped painting. He blinked as if trying to get his caller into mental focus. “I thought Benscombe searched it yesterday. I don’t suppose Glenda left any traces.”

  “That was informal,” said Crisp. “This will be formal. If it isn’t interrupting you, I’d be obliged if you would take us over the flat.”

  “Right-ho!” It was a barely concealed groan. “But I shan’t be the slightest use. I can never find anything in this flat.”

  He followed them sulkily into the corridor.

  “You’ll get a shock in the kitchen,” he warned them. “No one has come today to clear up the mess I made yesterday, and my bedroom’s no use for clues. As I think I mentioned she and I—”

  “We want to see everything, please,” said Crisp.

  In pursuance of his policy of always letting a man take his own line, Crisp accepted Fenchurch’s view of himself as an artist who had been interrupted in his work. He made a superficial examination of the kitchen, then turned to the bedroom, which was furnished in modern style, and, unlike the studio, was clean and tidy.

  On the top of a revolving bookcase at the bedside was a litter of pencils and fountain pens. Benscombe nodded to his Chief.

  “You’ve already confessed that these belong to other people, Mr. Fenchurch,” said Crisp amiably. He picked up a pencil which had a white enamelled barrel and the name of a South African maker embossed in red.

  “Where did this one come from?”

  “That’s an easy one. It’s Watlington’s. I hope you aren’t going through the lot like that. I don’t suppose I know any of the others.”

  “When did Watlington give it to you?”

  “You can’t give a man a penny pencil! He didn’t know I’d got it, any more than I did.”

  Crisp contrived to look as if he had asked a foolish question. In the room that had been Glenda’s, Crisp’s eye was caught by the cardboard dress box under the bed, in which Benscombe had discovered the paintings of Claudia Lofting.

  As Fenchurch followed his gaze, the thick, curving eyebrows lifted.

  “I wonder what that is!” exclaimed Fenchurch. He pulled the box out, tried the weight of it. “It feels like canvases. But I don’t remember packing anything in a box like this. D’you mind if I just see what it is? Can either of you lend me a knife?”

  “The string is loose,” said Benscombe hastily, remembering that he had cut it himself.

  Fenchurch removed the lid of the box.

  “Oh—yes!” Oblivious to the others, Fenchurch gazed at one after another of the pictures, emitting grunts of self-approbation.

  “Yes! God, yes!” He put the canvases back and was about to replace the lid.

  “Mayn’t we see them?” asked Crisp.

  “Certainly, if you’re interested in pictures.”

  Fenchurch passed them, one by one, to Crisp. The last was the nude of Claudia. ‘O madre mia.’

  Crisp looked long at the picture and then:

  “You know Miss Lofting very well, I see!”

  “Good lord!” Fenchurch, who had been kneeling by the box, sprang up. His eyes sparkled like the eyes of a happy child. “D’ you know, that’s the first time I’ve ever had a genuine, honest-to-God thrill out of someone’s comment on my work! My dear fellow, you’ve no idea what we put up with!
They say: ‘Oh that’s very clever—I recognised him at once’—as if one were very nearly as good as a beach photographer.”

  He clutched Crisp’s arm and overwhelmed him.

  “Make no mistake, Colonel! When I take a fee from a philistine, I deliberately compete with the photographer—and beat him hollow, because I make ’em look pretty, when they’re damned ugly—all of ’em! But when I’m allowed to do a bit of honest work—look at this pose on the bench in the cemetery at Casa Flavia—! I don’t paint the flesh. I paint the spirit.”

  “This nude study!” ejaculated Crisp, dodging a technical comment.

  “Hah! It flashed on me when we were coming back from the cemetery! A peasant started walloping his small son, making the kid scream. For a millionth of a second I saw Claudia’s soul—her gentleness, her sophistication turned to blue murder like that!”

  To Fenchurch, the Chief Constable’s presence had suddenly become interesting.

  “Look here, we’ve finished with all this clueage, haven’t we! I don’t suppose anybody will ever hear of Glenda again. Let’s have a drink. If you’re interested in these, I’ve got some other stuff you might like to see.”

  A search warrant, thought Benscombe, was evidently a meaningless term to the artist. They returned to the studio, where Fenchurch scrabbled in a cupboard for canvases to show Crisp.

  Benscombe indicated a litter in the far corner, made up of shopping bags, corrugated cardboard and brown wrapping paper.

  In a few seconds, Crisp found what he was looking for.

  “Mr. Fenchurch!”

  “Hullo! Found something?”

  “Yes!” When he had secured the other’s attention: “This.”

  Crisp handed him a piece of brown paper, about eighteen inches square, too crinkled to yield a finger print.

  “What d’ you want me to do with it?”

  “Look on the other side.”

  Fenchurch turned it over.

  “Addressed to Watlington. Came by registered post,” announced Fenchurch. He turned it over again. “Can’t see anything about Glenda.”

  Crisp persuaded him to leave the cupboard, to sit down and to concentrate on the matter in hand.

  “For the moment, we must put aside our enjoyable conversation about pictures,” said Crisp. “Fix your mind on the fact that we are investigating the murder of Lord Watlington. This piece of brown paper is what you contemptuously call ‘clueage.’ Now—please make every effort to tell me how it came into your flat.”

  “A piece of brown paper!” echoed Fenchurch. “I don’t know how to start making the effort. Pieces of brown paper are always coming into the flat. They accumulate. Some theory of Glenda’s that the stuff is rare. Why, there must be millions of pieces of brown paper in the corner over there!”

  “Look at the postmark on this piece.”

  Fenchurch sulkily complied.

  “It was posted in West London on Saturday at 10.30 a.m. That doesn’t tell me how it got here.”

  “The housemaid at Watlington Lodge signed for it at about four on Saturday afternoon. The parcel, of which that was the wrapper, lay on the table in the hall until five. Watlington was dead by five thirty.”

  Fenchurch stared at the Chief Constable. His quick receptivity had failed him. Very slowly, he absorbed the Chief Constable’s words.

  “This is devilishly awkward for me!” he muttered.

  “That’s an understatement,” remarked Crisp.

  “The irritating part is that I have no recollection whatever of picking up a piece of brown paper. I never do pick up pieces of brown paper. The stuff crackles and creaks, and what the hell should I want it for!”

  Crisp let him blow off his own steam, and presently asked:

  “You were at Watlington Lodge, then, on Saturday afternoon?”

  “This fantastic piece of paper apparently proves I was. And I particularly did not want you to know I had been there. I say, what else does this brown paper prove? Does it prove that I killed Watlington? You might just as well tell me. Everything is running your way. There’s surely no need for you to play Brer Rabbit?”

  The man’s genuine absorption in art, reflected Crisp, and his exaggerated egotism, together made him less able than other men to appreciate his position. His active intelligence operated only in the sphere of his own interests. He had an infantile conception of the police and their functions.

  “You told us you went for a walk by the river,” Crisp reminded him.

  “Oh, that was a purely social lie!” protested Fenchurch. “I didn’t want to drag Claudia Lofting into it. I expect she’s told you by now that we were lovers? She said this morning that the pace was getting pretty hot.”

  “I wouldn’t tell any more lies if I were you, Mr. Fenchurch,” evaded Crisp, “social or otherwise.”

  “In future, we must weigh every word,” agreed Fenchurch. “Everything I tell you will be true. But I’m damned well not going to tell you everything.”

  “Then suppose I damned well put you in clink?” grinned Crisp.

  “That would only be detention, wouldn’t it—I’d wear my own clothes, and so on? It’s penal servitude I’m afraid of. But not for murdering Watlington. A nice, fat philistine like that! After all the trouble I’d taken to nobble him! Besides, he didn’t annoy me. I rather liked him. A cad, invariably coarse, never vulgar. That aristocratic stuff of his was charming. But we can’t talk about that sort of thing now. I’ve got tangled up in your clues, and it’s not a nice feeling, I can tell you!”

  Crisp let him collect his thoughts and take his own line.

  “We’ll start the truth-telling from zero,” announced Fenchurch. “On Saturday morning I received a letter from Claudia asking me to destroy any letters of hers I might have kept, as it wasn’t fair to her or Ralph to run that kind of risk. I couldn’t find those letters. I thought at first Glenda had pinched them—then that she hadn’t, because I reminded myself that she was never jealous. When Benscombe told me yesterday that she had collected five hundred quid from Watlington, I realised that she had sold him my letters. Rotten little rat! I wish you could find her and run her in.”

  “Hi! You’re jumping ahead,” warned Crisp. “Keep your mind on Saturday morning.”

  “On Saturday morning I had a conviction that those letters were lying about somewhere, making trouble. In the course of the afternoon, it seemed to boil down to Watlington as the trouble maker. I hopped over to the Lodge. I went in by that gate in the west wall—”

  “Was it unlocked?” put in Benscombe.

  “It was locked. But if you kick it, it opens. Don’t interrupt, old man—it cramps the word-weighing. I had got as far as those yews when I spotted an elderly woman, obviously a lunatic, sitting on a bench. So I skirted round behind the stables and burgled the house through the open window of the dining-room. If I had walked on to the front door, she would have seen me.”

  “Why were you so anxious not to be seen entering the house?” asked Crisp.

  “Because I’ve had some experience of lunatics. She might have come in with me. Some of them hang on to your arm and tell you the story of their lives. I’d worked out how to tackle Watlington—”

  “But why on earth did you assume she was a lunatic?”

  “In your own jargon, there was prima facie evidence. A very large, elderly woman playing a childish game with a stocking. She had stuffed a ball or something into the toe. She was swinging it to and fro and goggling at it, as if she were afraid of it. To her disordered brain it was probably a symbol of something definitely nasty.”

  Benscombe glanced at the Chief, but learnt nothing from his expression. Fenchurch resumed:

  “In the hall, I could hear Watlington snoring. He was one of those heavy sleepers who keep saying: ‘What’s that?’ when you wake them. I had to poke him. Fortunately, he had a coughing fit, which woke him up enough to attend. When we’d got each other into a good temper—a bit of schoolboy smut would always make him laugh—”
/>   “What time was this?”

  “I don’t know. I taxed him with having procured those letters—”

  “Didn’t you hear that stable clock? It chimes every fifteen minutes.”

  “Yes. Horrible, isn’t it! I didn’t count the strokes, because I didn’t care what time it was. I couldn’t foresee that someone would want this extraordinary kind of information about garden gates and lunatics and stable clocks.”

  There was something besides the clock which could tell the time.

  “Did you notice a die-stamp on the writing table?”

  “And now a die-stamp!” His voice rose to a shrill, exasperated whine. “I did not notice a die-stamp. But pray do not conclude that there was therefore no die-stamp there. There may have been a dozen die-stamps—a hundred—I would still not have noticed even one of them. I don’t know what a die-stamp is, and I have not the very smallest curiosity. Forgive me—I am feeling the heat! Do you still want to know whether I murdered Watlington, or have we left all that behind?”

  For the nervous outburst, Crisp was magnanimous enough to blame himself. To give the other time to pull himself together he asked for a match.

  “So Watlington admitted being in possession of your letters?”

  “Not at once. I had to blackguard him a bit first.”

  “By talking about Casa Flavia and Tarranio and Fabroli?” suggested Crisp.

  “However did you manage to guess that?” Fenchurch’s astonishment was soon dissipated. “I know. You must have been reading the private notes Watlington made on his blotting pad. No doubt, you have to do that sort of thing in your profession.”

  “We do,” said Crisp. “What does the note mean?”

  “Casa Flavia is a town in Italy. I met Claudia there and we fell in love, after I had painted her. There’s no need for any secrecy about it, now that Watlington has been eliminated. But I cannot see how it concerns you in your official capacity.”

  “And what about Tarranio and Fabroli?”

  “I can’t tell you anything about them without incriminating myself in another direction. You will not ask me to do that.” He paused: “I can give you this information. They are Italian wine merchants.” Again he paused. “And I can tell you definitely that at no stage in my conversation with Watlington did either of us produce a piece of brown paper.”