Sleep of Death

by Anne Morice

  “Oh, the hell with him! I’m the one who needs extricating.”

  “Why? What have you got mixed up in?”

  “A persecution. That boring friend of yours never stops badgering me. She’s been at it for a couple of hours now.”

  “Which friend? Clarrie?”

  “Who else? The latest threat, as relayed to me by Mrs. Parkes, is to come over and squat here until you return, so make it as quick as you can.”

  “What’s she in a state about now, do you know?”

  “No, and I don’t care. If you can head her off, please do so. It’s all I ask.”

  “Okay, I’ll do my best, but it may mean that I shan’t be back as early as I had expected.”

  His reply to this was unrepeatable and I could only trust it was not spoken loud enough for Philip to overhear.

  Ten minutes later and still in the morning room, I said to my trusted friend and father-resembler: “You’ll contest it, of course?”

  “I don’t know. It was what I was going to ask you. What do you advise?”

  “I can’t tell you what your chances would be, Philip, if that’s what you mean. What does your solicitor say?”

  “He’s not my solicitor, he’s Dolly’s. That’s to say, he acted for us both, but she was the one who handled all our legal affairs and, up to now, there’s never been any conflict of interests. He didn’t come right out with it, but I had the impression that he wouldn’t be particularly keen to support me in getting the will revoked, if that’s what they call it.”

  “Understandable, I suppose, if he was the one who drew it up. You’ll have to find someone else to take it on.”

  “A complete stranger? I don’t care for that idea at all. And it’s not going to look very good, is it?”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Oh, all those reporters hounding me . . . gossip writers making a meal of it. Rather hard at my age, you know,” he added in a tearful voice.

  “Hard enough at any age, but people have had to do worse things than that for money and, anyway, all that side of it will very quickly die down and be forgotten.”

  “Oh, easy for you to say that, Tessa! You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. It’s different when you’re old and tired like me and only have a few years left.”

  “Then you’d better let me start by asking Robin whether he considers the game would be worth the candle. He’s not an expert, but he knows a bit more about the law than we do and his advice is usually sound.”

  “Oh, do what you like about it, it’s entirely up to you,” Philip said, speaking as though he was the one who was conferring a favour, which, to be fair, in a sense perhaps he was.

  II

  It was the hollow-eyed, Greek tragedy Clarrie who greeted me a couple of hours later.

  “I know I look terrible,” she announced, in case I hadn’t noticed it, “but I haven’t closed my eyes since I last saw you and I do think you might have stirred yourself to get here a bit sooner.”

  “I know and I’m sorry, but I had some business to finish off with Philip and I stopped on the way for a sandwich. I thought I’d be in a more constructive mood after some lunch and I had a feeling your cupboard might be bare.”

  “You were so right. I couldn’t even think of food in this crisis.”

  “So what’s it all about?”

  “I’d better let Pete tell you himself. Come on in!”

  “Oh, so Pete’s back in favour, is he?” I asked, following her on to the verandah. “Honestly, Clarrie, I find it hard to keep pace.”

  He was not only back, but quite at home again, lying stretched out on the lilo on his stomach, reading a magazine. He rolled over when we came in, swung his legs sideways on to the floor and sat up, all in one graceful movement.

  “He’s in very deep trouble,” Clarrie said, disregarding her own advice, “and you’ve got to help pull him out of it. It’s about that silly trick he played of going round to her ladyship’s flat on the night she was killed.”

  “Care for a drink, Tessa?”

  “No thanks, Pete, just had lunch. So it was you?”

  “Of course it was him, don’t be stupid! And I could really throttle him for being so idiotic. The trouble is that noblesse oblige won’t allow me to because it was all for my sake. Chivalry running riot!”

  “So far, it sounds like good news to me. No-one has much doubt it was him the lady saw and that the story about going back to the shop to collect your present was all my eye. If he can now produce some credible reason for being at the flat, it might not get him removed from the suspect list, but it could help.”

  “If only you two harpies would stop talking about me as though I wasn’t here! And the question is, my dear Tessa, will they find the reason credible, or won’t they? Clarrie, who is on my side, took a bit of convincing, which is not what you’d call a hopeful sign.”

  “Then why not try it out to me?”

  “Why else do you think we wanted you here, you fool?” Clarrie asked. “My idea, as it happens. Little Don Quixote here was against it, but I explained to him that you understood workings of the law and order mentality rather better than we do and we might as well use you as a guinea pig. It’s all mixed up with those bloody boring old anonymous letters.”

  “You don’t say? Did Pete write them?”

  “No, he thought perhaps I had.”

  “That is not true, Clarrie, I never said that. What I said was that I was afraid some people with nasty minds, in which category I include the police, might think you had.”

  “It amounts to the same thing.”

  “No, it does not. Where are you going, Tessa?”

  “Home,” I replied. “You’ll have to find someone else to be your guinea pig. I’ve had a tiring day, I only have an hour or two before I have to drive back to London and I have no intention of spending them listening to you two bickering.”

  Luckily for me, it worked and Pete said: “Yes, sorry, Tessa! How would it be if you were to exercise some superhuman self-control and keep your beautiful trap shut for about five minutes, Clarrie, while I tell her my own way? How clearly do you remember the wording on those letters?”

  “Clearly enough.”

  “Then you’ll recall that the first two had what one might call a religious theme?”

  “Which is why you thought they might have been inspired by Clarrie?”

  “No, I did not. You’re as bad as she is. That’s the last sort of trick I’d associate with our Clarrie. If she had a grudge against someone enough to want to kill them, which she nearly always has, she’d have been shouting the news at the top of her lungs all over London.”

  “I agree and, furthermore, the religious theme was dropped after the first two letters, so where’s the problem?”

  “Right there, in the fact that it was dropped. By that time several kind people had commented on the fact that Clarrie was the only one of our lot who was up on scripture, so if she had written them she’d have realised her mistake at that point and switched to a new line. At least, it seemed to me, that’s what people would think. You with me?”

  “I think so. Did Dolly tell you she’d given Oliver an ultimatum? Either he’d go to the police with the letters, or she’d do so herself?”

  “Yes, you have caught up. She not only told me, but I knew she meant every word of it. She also told me she’d refused to hand over the letters to him because she had a shrewd idea that it would be as good as throwing them on the fire.”

  “Which is when you decided to act?”

  “Yes, and not only for Clarrie’s sake, mark you, although that did come into it, but I thought it would be a hell of a lark to snatch the letters and then, when the grand moment of truth arrived, after all her squawks and threats, there she’d be with egg on her face.”

  “Did she tell you where she’d hidden them?”

  “Good as. She said she’d locked them away in a safe place, which was a first-class give-away. I could just visualise that potty lit
tle wall safe in her bedroom and the sort of picture that’d be covering it. A print, most likely, about twelve by ten, in a very light frame, so that it wouldn’t be too much of a chore taking it down and putting it back again.”

  “How come you know so much about the middle-class, older, rich woman’s psychology?” Clarrie asked, breaking out of her heroic restraint at last.

  “Oh well, one comes up against a funny lot in my line of business, you know. Believe it or not, I was once on friendly terms with a professional burglar, until he ran into a patch of bad luck and retired from public life. Fascinating chap and a great raconteur. I picked up quite a few tips from him about safe-breaking and so on.”

  “Which eventually came in useful?” I suggested. “Very daring of you, as an amateur, to put the advice into practice.”

  “No, not all that. I knew the coast would be clear and I’d have all the time I needed to work in, but I put it off till nine o’clock because I thought there’d be less chance then of running into any of the other tenants. It didn’t work out like that, though, as you probably know, and it was bad luck that nosey bitch turning up just when she did. I wished then I’d taken the trouble to make myself up a bit, wear a hat at least, but I’d reckoned on most people either being safe indoors by that time, or else out for the whole evening. Still, I wasn’t all that bothered. Even if it came out that someone looking a bit like me had called there, I didn’t think it was likely her ladyship would bother to let the police know that she was short of a few scraps of brown paper.”

  “But it was much worse than that, of course?”

  “Yes. When I walked in and saw her flopped over like that, purple in the face and dead as a doornail I nearly screamed. I had a job to stop myself rushing straight out into the corridor again. But I knew I had to keep my head, see? There was always the chance that Mrs. Nosey wouldn’t have given up and, if she was on the watch and saw me come bursting out, hell bent for the lift, I could be in dead trouble. So I stuck it out for three or four minutes and I was thankful I had. The blasted woman had left her door open and I knew damn well she was watching every move.”

  “So there you have it, Tessa, and what Pete and I want to know from you is whether he should confess all, or leave things as they are. He and I are not in agreement over it, so you must decide.”

  “Clarrie’s for and I’m against and you want to know why? You can bet your life they’d manage to twist it around in some way to tighten the noose. I gather from what they tell me that you’d be on her side.”

  “Yes, I was until I learnt that your little adventure was connected with the anonymous letters. Now I’m inclined to move over to yours.”

  “What difference do they make?”

  “Oh, all the difference, I’m afraid.”

  “Explain!”

  “Well, can’t you see, Pete, that when you repeat what Dolly had told you about her hiding place and how, as a result, you’d guessed the letters would be hidden in a wall safe in her bedroom, they’ll regard it as very astute thinking and that’s where you run into your first snag.”

  “Why?”

  “You didn’t, by any chance, spend those three or four minutes verifying your guess and rifling the safe?”

  “Hell, no. It could have taken anything up to half an hour and anyway the idea never entered my head. All I could think of was ducking out of there at the first moment it’d be safe to show my face outside.”

  “So there’s your answer!”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “The police will want to know why it was that when they carried out their own search only a couple of hours later there were no papers of that kind, either in the safe or anywhere else. Also why no-one has made one single reference to them and there is no evidence to prove they ever existed.”

  “Now I know you’re barmy,” Clarrie said in a disgusted voice. “Dozens of people can swear with their hands on their hearts that they existed. I’m one of them and you’re another. Obviously, what happened was that someone must have got there before Pete, ran slap into her ladyship, who wasn’t in the mood to take the intrusion lying down, finished her off and then started on the safe.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “there’s an outside chance that’s how it was, but it’s stretching it a bit, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not at all, it’s bloody staring you in the face.”

  “So long as you find it credible that two separate people called at the flat within hours of each other and for exactly the same purpose. It would take a bit of swallowing.”

  “The fact remains that it could have happened, but if it amuses you just to pick holes in everything, go ahead and enjoy yourself.”

  “It’s not for my own enjoyment, I’m just warning you what the official reaction is likely to be. Judging by his thoughtful expression, I imagine Pete agrees with me. It may have dawned on him by now that these two separate visitors had yet another thing in common.”

  “What’s that? What’s she on about now, Pete?”

  He did not reply and I did so for him: “You may not know this, either of you, but the safe wasn’t damaged in any way. It hadn’t been forced open, which means that what we’re faced with now is that whoever got there ahead of Pete either was or had been a professional burglar, or had become very chummy with one at some period of his life and had picked up some useful tips about safe-breaking.”

  “Or it could have been opened with a key,” Clarrie said. “Why not?”

  “Why not indeed, except that that would also need a certain degree of expertise in burglary,” I reminded her, throwing everything I’d got into my meaning look at Pete. “You don’t just walk up to someone and say ‘I wonder if I might borrow the key of your safe for an hour or two?’ So, whichever way you look at it, there’s a lot of coincidence about and I’m afraid there are some nasty minds who are going to come up with the idea that he invented the story, and what a noble, unselfish one at that, as an excuse for having been caught letting himself into the Mickletons’ flat that evening.”

  “But it was true, you know, every word of it. It was all for my sake, or nearly all anyway. Isn’t that so, Pete? Besides, how could anyone say he made it up when dozens of people will be able to say the silly old letters did exist and will also be able to remember what they said?”

  “The trouble is that his story differs from everyone else’s, in that he claims Dolly had told him in such detail where the letters were hidden. Very likely she did, but my guess is that the only other people she confided in to this extent were Philip and Oliver, and I am sorry to report that they both appear to have some good reason for denying that she told them anything of the kind.”

  “Why would they deny it?”

  “I don’t know, but the fact is that neither of them has seen fit to mention it, so far, which I take to be a bad sign and I have a nasty suspicion that, if they were questioned about it, you would find them both saying that, to the best of their knowledge, the letters had been destroyed before Dolly was killed.”

  “So that’s that then, and a fat lot of good you’ve been! Now what are we going to do, I’d like you to tell me!”

  “Why do you have to do anything?” I asked, as she walked out to the car with me. “I can’t see why knowing about it has made you any worse off than you were before. Pete hasn’t been arrested and isn’t likely to be, so long as they don’t turn up any fresh evidence against him, so what are you agitating about?”

  “You don’t know the half of it!”

  “Okay, tell me the other three quarters.”

  “He’s obsessed with the idea that they’ve got it in for him. I don’t quite understand why, to be honest. There was some brush he had with them years ago over a drunk-driving charge which he swears they rigged, and it seems to have left some indelible scars. I don’t know all the details, but nothing will shake him out of the idea that they’re going all out to dig up something disreputable against him and, if they don’t find it, they’ll invent it.”
>
  “No, they won’t. That’s nonsense!”

  “Try telling him that! He says, once they’ve got some tiny mark against you, you don’t stand a chance when something like this ghastly murder turns up. That’s why he walked out on me last Sunday. It was getting him down, being on his own here all Saturday evening, when I was at that rotten boring party, that he couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. So he got up early and spent the whole day mooning around the countryside.”

  “But it’s only this silly prejudice that makes him feel victimised, isn’t it? All in the mind, as they say?”

  “I don’t know, Tessa, I honestly don’t but it’s going to drive us both out of them, if it doesn’t stop soon. He says now that both our telephone lines are being tapped. I can’t say I’ve noticed anything funny about them, but maybe he’s right and that’s not much fun, is it?”

  “They can tap away till kingdom come, but it won’t make any difference, so long as he has nothing to hide.”

  “Of course, he hasn’t anything to hide. Everything he told you about going to the flat and finding her ladyship dead was the stark, naked truth. He doesn’t know any more than anyone else who got there first.”

  I did not dispute this, since my reservations arose from the fact that he had not, by a very long chalk, been honest with her about his youthful tangle with the police and that therefore his current activities in the antique business might also be open to question.

  Nor did I consider it advisable to precipitate another row between them by suggesting that she might ask him whether all the driving around during the weekend had been quite so aimless and blameless as he would have her believe.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I

  “So who does get the money?” Robin asked towards the end of dinner.

  “The stepdaughter in South Africa, who hasn’t even bothered to put in an appearance. Isn’t that incredible? Dolly had scarcely set eyes on her after the father died. Apparently the Mickletons sponged on her for free board and lodging during the South Africa tour the year before last and, when she came over last summer, she returned the compliment by spending a couple of weekends at The Old Rectory, but apart from that there hardly seems to have been any communication at all.”