by Eric Brown
‘Right-ho, the situation is this. As long as the investigation is continuing, I’d be delighted if you’d all remain here at Connaught House. By all means, you can take the time to visit our wonderful Cornish countryside, but don’t go scooting off back to the Smoke or elsewhere. That’s the ticket. I’ll have a couple of men stationed here for the next few days and nights. The chances are that I, or one of my colleagues, will be around tomorrow for another little chat.’
And with that he wished them goodnight and took his leave.
‘Droll cove,’ Pandora said when they were alone.
‘I think the technical term, my dear,’ Charles said, ‘is that the man is a cynic.’
From the depths of his armchair, Colonel Haxby stirred himself. ‘My God, is that the time? I wonder if Connaught would mind if I made a little sortie on the kitchen?’
Pandora grunted, ‘I should think, Colonel, that he’s past caring much one way or the other.’
‘Ah, quite … Well, in that case, I might just dash along and make meself a sandwich.’
Charles, Pandora and Lady Cecelia said goodnight and took themselves off to their respective rooms.
Wilson Royce said, ‘I don’t know about you two, but I need another drink.’
‘I’d go easy …’ Langham said, but Royce ignored him and moved towards the bar.
Maria said to Langham, ‘Early night?’
He kissed her fingers. ‘Good idea, but first I need to make a quick phone call.’
They said goodnight to Royce, and Langham made a detour to the sitting room. He dialled the operator and was put through to Detective Inspector Jeff Mallory’s home number.
‘Jeff, sorry to bother you on a Sunday night, but something’s cropped up …’
Five minutes later, he thanked his friend, rang off, then called Ralph and informed him of Connaught’s death.
‘Ruddy hell, Don! Murdered? You don’t think young Royce had a hand in it?’
‘Early days, Ralph. You come up with anything on him?’
‘Just a bit. Looks like our young friend was getting his hands dirty in the illicit art market, just as we thought.’
Langham listened while Ralph detailed his meeting with a dodgy art dealer called Harker.
‘And I got the key cut for Royce’s place in Chelsea. I’ll pop round there in the morning.’
‘Good work, Ralph. I’ll be in touch.’
He replaced the receiver and hurried upstairs.
Maria was removing her make-up at the dresser when he entered the bedroom. ‘Phoning Ralph?’ she asked.
‘Yes, and Jeff Mallory.’
He told her what he’d overheard Harper telling his deputy, and went on, ‘If the Yard is brought in, then there’s no one better I’d like on the case than Jeff.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He’ll have a word with his boss first thing. He thinks he can swing it, as I’m down here and have the inside gen.’ He stood beside her and kicked off his shoes. ‘And according to Ralph, Wilson Royce has been doing a bit of shady dealing in the art market.’ He told her what Ralph had discovered.
She nodded and stared down at her hands.
‘Maria?’
She sighed. ‘Oh, I’m just wondering who might have …’ She trailed off, then said, ‘In all likelihood, Donald, it was one of the guests, wasn’t it?’
He kissed the top of her head and murmured, ‘Come to bed.’
SIXTEEN
‘Are you ever going to get up, Ralph?’ Annie called up the stairs on Monday morning. ‘I thought you said you wanted an early start!’
Ryland rose through fathoms of half sleep, rolled over and stared at the cracked ceiling. He rubbed his eyes and peered at the alarm clock. It was almost nine.
He recalled Millwall’s one–nil victory against Walsall on Saturday, with Shepherd scoring in the second half. That had set him up nicely for Sunday and the picnic on Hampstead Heath with the boys sailing their toy boats on the pond. The weather had kept fine, and Annie’s ham and mustard sandwiches had slipped down a treat.
Then last night Don had called from Cornwall.
So the scribbler Connaught was dead, and Wilson Royce was a suspect … Well, he’d go through Royce’s place with a nit-comb that morning.
He rolled out of bed, splashed his face with cold water, then dressed and made his way downstairs.
‘Toast’s ready,’ Annie said. ‘Marmite or marmalade?’
‘Strawberry jam.’
‘Kevin’s finished it.’
‘The little blighter. Marmalade, then.’
He sat at the table with a big mug of strong tea and two slices of toast and marmalade.
Annie sat down with her own tea. ‘That business in Cornwall, Ralph. You won’t be needing to go down, will you?’
‘No fear. Looks like Scotland Yard will be brought in. Inspector Mallory. Good man. He and Don’ll get to the bottom of it in no time. No, I’ll poke about up here for the next day or so, see if I can find out a bit more about our young Mr Royce.’
‘You won’t be long this morning, I hope?’
‘An hour – two at the most.’
‘I want you back by twelve. Don’t forget you promised to take me into town for a new coat.’
‘I’d better be getting a shuffle on, then.’
‘Egg and tomato sandwiches for lunch?’
‘Smashing.’ He gave her a kiss. ‘See you on the dot of twelve.’
‘Likely story.’ She swiped at him. ‘You’re never on time for anything, Ralphy.’
When he went out to the car, Terry and Kevin were playing cowboys and Indians with a noisy gang of local kids on the bomb site across the road. He managed to slip in behind the wheel without being targeted by either the cavalry or Comanches, and set off north to Chelsea.
He’d picked up the key from Harry Beckett after the match at five on Saturday, but the promised half pint had turned to three, while the boys had been happy with a bottle of Tizer and a couple of pickled eggs.
‘That doesn’t smell like a half to me,’ Annie had said on his return.
‘Kevin, Terry, tell your mum …’
Terry, the eldest, had grinned at Ryland and said, all innocence, ‘He had three pints, Mum.’
You had to laugh, he thought, as he took the Hammersmith Bridge over the river.
He reached Chelsea by ten thirty, found Saddler’s Way and parked at the end of the mews.
Now to see if Harry’s key would do the business.
He sauntered up the cobbled mews, as casual as you like, and found number ten. He slipped the key into the door and turned it; it worked like a dream. A second later he was in the front room with the door shut behind him.
He’d heard that these mews houses – Victorian stables converted after the Great War – were small and poky, but this one was bigger than his Lewisham terrace house. It had a medium-sized lounge, a big kitchen and two bedrooms upstairs. He found nothing in the bedrooms, other than an unmade double bed, a pile of well-thumbed Penguin paperbacks, and unwashed clothes strewn across the floor.
Downstairs, a portable typewriter sat on a rickety desk. Royce had started a letter to the blonde: Dear Beatrice …
He stood in the middle of the room and looked around, then pulled the drawer in the desk all the way out and sat down on a two-seater settee. He went through the contents of the drawer item by item: bills, paid and unpaid, an old ration book, loose stamps and a current Barclay’s paying-in book, with a cheque sticking out of it like a bookmark. He pulled out the cheque and studied it.
Now this was interesting …
The cheque, dated five days ago, was for two hundred pounds sterling, to be drawn on the account of Denbigh Connaught.
He flipped through the bank book until he came to the most recent deposits, and ran a finger down the list.
Bingo!
Every month, on or around the twentieth, Wilson Royce deposited a cheque for two hundred pounds into his account. He flipped back
a few pages and found that the deposits had started just over a year ago.
Two hundred nicker, every month?
Very well, Royce worked for the novelist Denbigh Connaught – but surely he wouldn’t be pulling in that kind of monthly salary, would he?
He went through the rest of the papers, found nothing of interest, and was about to replace the contents back in the drawer when he caught sight of a letter addressed to Denbigh Connaught.
The envelope had been opened. He pulled out a single sheet of notepaper and read through the short, scrawled letter.
It was addressed simply to ‘Connaught’ and was from someone called Pandora Jade.
She would be taking up his invitation to come down to Cornwall on the weekend of the eighteenth, but only on the condition that Annabelle would not be present. The agreement, she went on, was that she would not be told about me, and you will appreciate that from my point of view I’d rather not run the risk of bumping into our daughter …
Strange, Ryland thought. What was a letter addressed to Denbigh Connaught doing in Royce’s possession? Granted, he was the novelist’s business manager, but the letter had nothing to do with business as far as he could make out.
He replaced the letter in the drawer and slipped it back into the desk.
On top of the desk, beside a telephone, was a small black address book. He turned to the back of the book and looked for Venturi’s name and address under V, but nothing was listed.
He should have known that tracing Venturi wouldn’t be that easy. Last night he’d settled down with the London phone book and found half a dozen entries under Venturi, but not one of them had been a P. Venturi …
Just a tick, he thought, staring at the names and addresses in the book. Wilson Royce had entered his contacts under their first names …
He turned to the letter P in the thumb index and smiled.
No wonder he’d been unable to find a Signor P. Venturi in the London phone book.
Piero Venturi, Rowan Cottage, Church Lane, Smarden, Kent.
No phone number was listed.
Ryland copied the address into his notebook. All things considered, it had been a morning well spent.
Now it was time to get back home before the twelve o’clock deadline, to prove to the trouble and strife that he could be punctual.
And tomorrow, he thought, he would take a little drive out into the country.
SEVENTEEN
As they were dressing the next morning, Maria said, ‘I had an awful dream, Donald. All about Wilson Royce … The police were hauling him off to the gallows, and he was screaming.’ She shuddered. ‘You don’t think Royce could be mixed up in this business, do you?’
Langham considered. ‘I honestly don’t know. He had the spare key to the study, and he was around all afternoon. And although he isn’t exactly Charles Atlas, perhaps he could have strangled Connaught.’
Maria pulled a face. ‘It must have been …’ She didn’t finish the sentence.
‘Pretty damned awful, my darling,’ he said. ‘The killer was obviously known to Connaught, as there was no sign of a struggle, and I suspect he had his back to his killer when he was attacked. Against the possibility of Royce being the culprit, what might his motive have been? Why would he murder his employer – the hand that feeds?’
‘Also,’ she said, ‘he seemed very distressed yesterday. Unless he’s an excellent actor …’
‘Mmm.’ Langham opened the door and they left the room. ‘I’m inclined to look elsewhere, I must admit.’
Charles was the only other person at breakfast when they entered the dining room.
‘Wonderful!’ he called out. ‘I feared, for a space, that I might be eating alone.’
‘We’re here to spare you that,’ Langham said. He helped himself to toast and scrambled egg from the sideboard and sat beside Maria, who was applying butter and raspberry jam to her toast.
‘Do you know,’ Charles said, ‘breakfast, once upon a time, was the loneliest meal of all. I mean to say, one can hardly ring someone at eight in the morning and say, “Come over for breakfast, why not?” All the other meals of the day, one can assuage one’s loneliness with the company of friends.’
Maria smiled. ‘Was the loneliest, Charles? But now?’
‘Now, my dear, since Albert has moved into my Suffolk abode and taken over the running of the house … I rise to the sound of his manly baritone in the kitchen and the scent of bacon and eggs. Did I tell you that he’s the most divine cook? I didn’t? Well, his breakfasts are heavenly, if he still has a little to learn in the dinner department.’
Charles popped a kidney into his mouth, chewed as if in bliss and said, ‘But here I am, describing the delights of cohabitation to newlyweds!’
Maria laughed. ‘But I don’t wake up to Donald cooking me breakfast!’ she said, nudging him in the ribs.
‘You’re such a good cook,’ Langham said, ‘that in all fairness I couldn’t inflict my offerings on you, could I?’
‘Perish the thought.’
Charles dabbed his lips with a napkin. He looked from Langham to Maria. ‘I couldn’t sleep a single wink last night. I couldn’t help thinking about Connaught, and that yesterday afternoon, while I lay in bed reading his novel … someone was … was …’ He pulled a sour face. ‘It’s just too ghastly to think about.’
Langham drained his tea and asked Charles, ‘You didn’t happen to look out of your window yesterday afternoon and see anyone in the grounds?’
‘I lunched with Lady Cecelia at twelve thirty, and we had a pleasant little chat about mutual acquaintances in London. I returned to my room at approximately two, and resumed reading the manuscript. I left the house for a breath of fresh air, at perhaps three thirty, and walked along the lane for a hundred yards before exhaustion ensued. I returned, via the drawing room, for a glass of tonic water.’
‘What time would that be?’ Langham asked.
‘Perhaps a little after four,’ Charles replied. ‘And at what time did the terrible deed occur?’
‘It’s not certain yet, but at a guess I’d say between two o’clock and four. Did you see anyone when you were in the drawing room?’
Charles frowned in concentration. ‘Colonel Haxby was slumped in an armchair, dead to the world. I poured myself a tonic water … moved to the French windows … admired the view, the sea, the cloudless sky … And yes – I saw young Wilson off to the right.’
‘What was he doing?’
‘Nothing. That is, staring across the lawn. I think he might have been smoking a cigarette.’
‘And you saw no one else?’
‘A little earlier, on returning from my amble, I saw Pandora composing one of her fearful abstracts on the side lawn. But I fear I saw no one stalking the grounds.’ He looked downcast. ‘But then I wouldn’t have, would I? For the sad and tragic fact of the matter is that poor old Connaught was done to death by someone resident in the house all along.’
Langham wiped his lips with his napkin. ‘That’s a possibility, Charles, but not a foregone conclusion. Someone from outside could easily have entered the grounds, unseen, and approached the study.’
‘I hope so,’ Charles murmured. ‘I know it’s ridiculous, but it would be easier to accept if the perpetrator was not someone with whom one had actually socialized, wouldn’t it? Or am I being a silly old fool?’
Maria assured him that he’d expressed exactly what she had been thinking earlier.
A little later they were joined at the table by Pandora Jade and Lady Cecelia.
‘Has anyone seen Royce?’ Langham asked.
‘I saw him a minute ago, taking a cup of tea into his room,’ Pandora said. ‘He looked somewhat morose and sorry for himself.’
‘Sorry for himself?’ Lady Cecelia pondered. ‘I wonder why?’
‘Probably thinks he’ll soon be out on his ear,’ Pandora said, tucking into her bacon and eggs. ‘He was Connaught’s business manager, after all. With Connaught gone to meet his m
aker, there’s effectively no business to manage. Ergo: exit Royce.’
Langham found himself studying the hands of each person around the table. Lady Cecelia’s were thin, grey and frail – very much like the rest of her – while Pandora’s were short and stubby, but in such a way as to suggest effeteness, not strength. Charles’s hands were pink and plump, not that Langham for a second entertained the notion that his friend might have strangled the novelist. He recalled Wilson Royce’s long, epicene hands and Monty Connaught’s damaged claw, and wondered how any one of the group could have summoned the strength to commit the deed.
An outsider, then? Someone who had sneaked unseen into the grounds and bearded Connaught in his study?
He turned to Pandora. ‘Yesterday afternoon you were painting from just after lunch until we saw you around five. Were you there all the time?’
She set down her knife and fork very deliberately. ‘Playing the amateur detective, Langham? Do you think I did it?’
‘Of course not. In fact, I’m pretty sure that no one in the house at the time was responsible. But you might have seen someone – a stranger, perhaps, who entered the grounds at some point yesterday.’
‘As I told the inspector last night,’ she said, ‘I saw no one, and I was there from around twelve thirty until well after five. No one came in through the gates, other than Charles. I also saw Lady Cee briefly, and we chatted.’
‘Of course,’ Lady Cecelia said, ‘the killer might have climbed over the perimeter walls. They are rather high, but where there’s a will …’
‘That’s certainly a possibility,’ Langham said.
Lady Cecelia placed worried fingers to her mouth. ‘Do you think the police are taking that line: that the culprit was an outsider? Or do you think they consider us all as suspects?’
‘Face it, Lady Cee,’ Pandora said, ‘everyone who was anywhere in the vicinity yesterday is on their suspect list. The police have to do their job.’
‘But I couldn’t strangle a lamb!’ Lady Cecelia protested.