Paul Temple and the Curzon Case (A Paul Temple Mystery)

by Francis Durbridge

  It was a quarter to ten. Paul took her arm and went in search of Scott Reed.

  ‘I’m fed up with cocktail parties!’ said Scott, staring at a burn and three whisky stains on the carpet. ‘I do hope it hasn’t been too boring, Temple. Goodbye, Steve, so good of you to have kept those detectives amused.’

  Kate Balfour had long since gone home, so Paul pottered about in the kitchen producing the cocoa. He prided himself on his masculine independence. He could make cocoa without burning the milk and boil an egg without the yolk becoming solid. He took the drinks upstairs to the living room flushed with a sense of achievement.

  ‘I hope we didn’t leave too abruptly,’ he said as he put the tray on the table. ‘You didn’t even tell Dr Stern how much you admire his book.’

  ‘I didn’t admire it,’ Steve confessed. ‘But I did read the wretched thing, which is why I found the rest of you so irritating.’ She went across to the telephone answering machine on the shelf beside Paul’s desk. The large room was furnished in two halves separated by a step. Paul’s study was the half above the garage. ‘We left abruptly because I didn’t want you to start advising the police how to do their job. I know how they resent it—’

  ‘I thought Sir Graham was inviting my opinion.’

  ‘He may have been, but he’s only the assistant commissioner. Charlie Vosper is the man who does the work, and he didn’t want your advice. He’ll make Sir Graham pay for tonight’s little indiscretion, I could see it from his eyes.’

  Steve smiled at the thought and absently pressed the button on the automatic answering machine. It whirred gently as the loop tape spun back to the beginning. ‘This is Paul Temple’s residence,’ said the recorded voice. ‘Mr and Mrs Temple are not available, but if you care to leave a message…’

  Paul sank back into the armchair and drank his cocoa. He was beginning to hate the anonymous actor whose voice punctuated the messages; he always avoided switching on the machine until he was properly fortified against the day by three cups of coffee.

  The telephone rang three times and the actor repeated his piece. ‘Gor,’ said a man in disgust, ‘I’ll write you a bloody letter.’ The telephone clicked, rang three times, and the actor spoke again. It was nerve-racking.

  ‘Damn,’ said a girl’s voice. ‘Oh well, this is Diana Maxwell. I needed to speak urgently to Mr Temple. Tell him I’ll ring him back, will you? I do hate all these mechanised gadgets!’

  Paul rose to his feet in astonishment. ‘What did she say her name was?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Steve. ‘Now isn’t that a coincidence?’ She spun the tape back to replay the message. ‘She’s the poet who seemed quite normal to Charlie Vosper.’

  ‘It isn’t a coincidence,’ Diana Maxwell explained when she telephoned the next day. ‘Inspector Vosper visited me on Friday and he mentioned your literary cocktail party. I think Westerby Hall brought out the democrat in him, but all his resentment was displaced on to your literary shindig. He said you would make him look like a penguin.’

  ‘Charlie Vosper has always walked like that,’ said Paul. ‘Why did you want to talk to me?’

  ‘I need your help, Mr Temple. Now that the police are searching for the Baxter brothers I think I’m in danger.’

  ‘I’m a busy man, Miss Maxwell,’ he said politely, ‘and I never interfere in the work of the police. Inspector Vosper is specially trained to protect people in danger.’ And the danger, Paul reflected, could not be imminent. She had waited three days to telephone him after the inspector’s visit, and a further twenty-four hours had passed before she rang back. ‘In danger from whom?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Someone by the name of Curzon.’

  Paul walked round the desk and sat in his swivel chair. ‘Go on, Miss Maxwell.’ Full marks, he thought, to the inspector’s nose. ‘Tell me about Curzon.’

  ‘Not over the telephone. Do you know the Three Boars in Greek Street? I’ll meet you there at eight o’clock.’ She clearly did not expect any argument. ‘I’ll recognise you, but just for the record I’m wearing a blue suit, no hat; blue handbag. I’m fair, twenty-three and reasonably pretty.’

  Paul smiled to himself. ‘I had formed that impression, Miss Maxwell. You know what Robert Browning said: “The devil hath not in all his quiver’s choice”—’

  ‘An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice,’ she completed. ‘But for your information, Mr Temple, it was Lord Byron.’

  They had to park nearly two hundred yards from the Three Boars. Paul took his wife’s arm and walked through the neon-lit glitter of the Latin quarter. It lacked the vitality and charm, he reflected sadly, of the days when he had first got to know his London. The colour had been replaced by commercialism, it was no longer crime and vice for the simple pleasure of it. Or perhaps nostalgia was playing tricks with his memory.

  ‘This shouldn’t take us long,’ said Paul. ‘Where do you fancy eating afterwards?’

  ‘Wheelers?’ suggested Steve.

  ‘Clever me,’ murmured Paul. ‘I’ve booked a table for nine o’clock.’

  ‘Clever.’

  The Three Boars was just another Soho pub, but the room upstairs was used for poetry readings and so the new literacy was centred on the bars. The barmaid with the flaxen hair and large bosom had been the inspiration of two sonnets, an ode to joy, and a somewhat clinical poem about sex. The clientele, Paul noticed as they went through to the saloon bar, looked conventional enough, except that the restrained young men in grey suits were probably known to the police, and the four scruffy characters shouting at each other in the corner were poets.

  ‘Blue suit, twenty-three,’ Paul said to himself. The girl by the door was pretty, but she didn’t look like a poet. She looked rather different. She waved.

  ‘I’m Diana Maxwell,’ she gasped. ‘It’s awfully good of you to come like this. I do appreciate—’

  Paul bought the drinks while Steve took care of the small talk. He watched the girl in the mirror behind the bar. A striking figure, elegantly dressed, but for a niece of Lord Westerby surprisingly lacking in poise. She fiddled with her long blonde hair as she talked and kept glancing about the room.

  ‘Did anyone follow you here?’ she asked when Paul arrived with the drinks. ‘Did you notice a large red saloon car?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Paul. ‘Parking is so bad in London now that gangsters travel by taxi.’

  The girl tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Temple. I’m not used to physical danger. Six weeks ago I was leading a perfectly ordinary life. That’s why I’m frightened. They’ve already tried to kill me twice, and sooner or later they’ll succeed.’

  ‘Now listen,’ said Paul with a laugh, ‘I know that two boys have vanished into thin air, but—’

  ‘You don’t know much about Curzon, do you?’

  ‘That’s true,’ Paul agreed. ‘That’s why I’m here, remember? You telephoned me and said you’d been talking to Charlie Vosper. We quoted Byron at each other.’ He broke off. Two men had come into the bar with that purposeful look of debt collectors in search of a defaulter. ‘So tell me about Curzon, Miss Maxwell.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said quickly. ‘It was good of you to come.’ The two men moved together into the centre of the room. ‘Five weeks ago when I was staying at Westerby Hall I came across—’ The larger of the two men took a pistol from his raincoat pocket and fired it from point-blank range. The girl stared in dismay before spinning backwards off her chair. A sudden cavity appeared in the side of her neck and filled with blood.

  ‘Get down, Steve, for God’s sake!’ Paul shouted.

  The two men ran before the panic started. They were gone when Paul Temple reached the street. He caught a glimpse of a red saloon car driving away. People were screaming in the bar, several men spilled into the street, and when Paul returned he found a crowd staring down at the girl—

  Steve was kneeling beside the girl’s head, dabbing ineffectually at the wound with a Kleenex. She looked up at Paul. ‘Diana Maxwell is
dead,’ she murmured.

  Paul picked up a broken sherry glass from the carpet. A pool of blood had been seeping towards it. ‘If this poor kid is dead,’ he said in bewilderment, ‘somebody has blundered. Because she is not Diana Maxwell.’

  Chapter Two

  Dulworth Bay had been a fishing village since Saxon times, and according to local legend it had then been a popular landing place for marauding Danes. The older families were still predominantly blonde-haired, and the growth of modern Britain had made little impact on their culture. The village was built precariously round the bay, ramshackle houses poised on the cliffs and steep winding streets plunging down to the beach.

  A sprinkling of artists had moved into the village, and a few weekend people from Leeds and Middlesbrough had bought weekend houses, but they didn’t belong. In Dulworth Bay you remained a foreigner for three generations, and holidaymakers were encouraged to keep moving until they reached Scarborough twenty miles to the south. To the west, a few hundred yards inland, the Whitby moors extended into nothing.

  It was a remote spot, yet the police grapevine covered it effectively. A brief telephone call from Inspector Vosper to his north-country colleague ensured that Paul Temple’s visit to Yorkshire was doomed to frustration.

  ‘But this visit is nothing to do with your Baxter brothers,’ Steve had protested innocently. ‘This is a purely nostalgic holiday. I used to know Whitby years ago.’

  ‘I don’t,’ the inspector had said doggedly, ‘want you involved.’

  Paul Temple had been slightly exasperated. ‘When a girl asks for my help and is then killed sitting beside me, Charlie, I think I become involved. Whether you and I like it or not. I promised I’d help Miss Maxwell, because she was afraid—’

  ‘Miss Maxwell is alive and well and staying in Yorkshire!’ said Vosper. When they were out of earshot he telephoned Inspector Morgan. The mention of Assistant Commissioner Forbes had clinched it: they would treat Paul Temple and his wife with impeccable good manners and absolute inscrutability.

  They were staying at the Victoria Hotel in Whitby, as a gesture towards diplomacy. It would look less, Paul had thought, as though they were investigating the Dulworth Bay mystery. But Inspector Morgan paid them a courtesy visit on the first morning after their arrival. ‘Just to see whether I can be of help,’ he said diplomatically. ‘Mrs Temple may have forgotten her way around after all those years in the south…’ Inspector Morgan was stationed in Whitby, which he clearly thought would be convenient for them all. ‘Where were you thinking of visiting?’

  Steve mentioned St Gilbert’s, ‘Although I think I can find it without having to trouble you, Inspector.’

  ‘St Gilbert’s?’ he repeated inscrutably. ‘I don’t suppose you’re telling me that Mrs Temple wants to visit her old school?’ He seemed about to wink at Paul. ‘Because St Gilbert’s is a boys’ school.’ He stared smugly at Steve’s trim figure.

  ‘One of the masters is an old friend of my uncle’s,’ she explained. ‘I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen. He was the Latin master in those days, which is probably why I still find amo-amas-amat slightly romantic. I’ve invited him to dinner this evening.’

  ‘Sounds as though it should be fun,’ said the inspector. ‘Have you planned many other trips down memory lane?’

  ‘Westerby Hall?’ Paul suggested.

  ‘Westerby Hall,’ the inspector repeated with impeccable good manners. ‘Ah yes, that’s where Lord Westerby lives.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said cannily, ‘know whether Miss Maxwell is staying with him at the moment.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Paul. ‘If she isn’t there I’m sure the walk will have done us good. Our journey won’t be wasted. There’s nothing like the Yorkshire moors—’

  ‘I did hear a rumour that Miss Maxwell is dead.’

  ‘False, Inspector Morgan, as you well know!’

  Paul Temple had tried to find Miss Maxwell in London, but she had proved elusive. The flat which she shared with a girl called Bobbie Jameson had been empty when he called. Miss Jameson was dead and Miss Maxwell had left for Yorkshire. Paul had let himself in the front door with a sliver of perspex against the lock, and he had spent nearly half an hour searching for something to indicate what the girls were mixed up with. But he found nothing.

  It was obvious that Diana Maxwell used the flat merely as a pied-a-terre when she was in London. There were few possessions or papers belonging to her, and most of the photographs were of Bobbie Jameson. She had been the girl in the pub.

  The instinct for self-preservation which had prompted Diana Maxwell to send a substitute had also led her straight back to Yorkshire when death had struck. But three hundred miles, Paul reflected sourly, was not very far if someone was determined to kill you.

  Despite his boast to Inspector Morgan Paul drove out to Westerby Hall. He saw no reason to overdo the healthy life. The Yorkshire countryside was spectacular, but better appreciated from behind the wheel of a car. By foot it could reduce a man to exhaustion and madness. It made a man feel small. Westerby Hall was a mile inland from Dulworth Bay, nestling in a valley as if in hiding.

  ‘Let’s walk up to the house, darling,’ Steve suggested as a compromise to physical fitness. ‘We can look at these incredible wrought iron gates. I do believe they’re by Tijou.’

  They parked by the monumental gates. Steve examined them ecstatically, talking of Tijou’s work at Hampton Court and speculating on the likelihood of the master travelling so far north.

  There was a stream running along the high brown stone wall of the estate, and Paul’s eyes followed the glittering band of water through the valley. He could hear a noise like angry wasps approaching, and then in the distance he noticed a tiny green sports car driving much too fast down the hill from the moors. Its wheels visibly left the road as it leaped across a hump backed bridge and the noise of the engine became a roar.

  ‘Woman driver,’ said Paul.

  Steve had decided the gates were superb imitations. She turned away reluctantly to watch the sports car. ‘She looks like a woman after your own heart,’ said Steve ironically. ‘Do you think someone’s chasing her?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ Paul said with a laugh.

  She was doing at least seventy miles an hour along the narrow lane towards them. A girl’s blonde hair streamed out behind her, reminding Paul of advertisements for motor oil. The aggressive thrust of the engine seemed to pause and the noise rose an octave as the girl changed gear.

  ‘She’s trying to stop,’ Paul muttered.

  ‘Brakes?’ suggested Steve.

  The car slithered suddenly, shuddered on to the grass verge, and without reducing speed travelled straight at Paul and Steve. It was almost entirely out of control, yet somehow the girl at the wheel managed to avoid them and smash into the wrought iron gates. The car came to rest several yards into the grounds with a tangle of irreplaceable metal twisted round the bonnet.

  ‘Damn!’ said the blonde.

  She leapt miraculously from the wreckage and waved to Paul. ‘Sorry if I startled you,’ she called. ‘The bloody brakes failed.’ Her head disappeared beneath the front wheels while she tried to trace the mechanical fault.

  ‘Those beautiful gates,’ Steve said softly. ‘Look at the mess. And she hit them on purpose, to avoid the wall.’

  ‘And to avoid us,’ said Paul as he ambled across to the car. ‘I’m rather glad she doesn’t know much about art.’ He stared down at the girl’s lime-green slacks.

  She wriggled out from under the wheels as he watched. ‘There you are,’ she said irritably, ‘the track rods have snapped in two.’

  Paul gestured sadly at the buckled bonnet. ‘I’m afraid that’s a minor detail now, Miss Maxwell. You need a new engine, and the chassis looks none too healthy.’ But he glanced under the wheels to see the offending brakes. ‘Dangerous,’ he murmured.

  ‘I’ll get my uncle to send the chauffeur down. He can a
t least have it towed away.’ She stood up and turned to look at Paul with her full attention. An impressive girl with pale blue eyes, much more commanding and poised than the girl in the cafe. ‘How do you know my name?’ she asked.

  ‘We’ve spoken to each other on the telephone,’ said Paul. ‘I recognise your voice. You rang me in London. My name’s Temple, and the lady trying to mend the gates is my wife Steve.’

  ‘Hello,’ Steve called.

  The girl was surprised. ‘I’ve no idea what you mean,’ she began. ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘You asked me to meet you in the Three Boars,’ said Paul. ‘But it was very wise of you not to come. You might have been killed.’ He smiled sympathetically. ‘By the way, I’m terribly sorry about your friend Bobbie Jameson. She was a nice girl. Her death must have been a great shock to you.’

  Her pale blue eyes were coldly deliberate. ‘I didn’t ask you to meet me, Mr Temple. I’ve never spoken to you on the telephone and I wish you hadn’t told the police I had. It caused me some embarrassment.’

  Paul shrugged and held open the door of his car. ‘I’m sure my friend Inspector Vosper was the soul of tact. Can I give you a lift to the Hall? It’s a long walk up this drive.’

  She climbed into Paul’s car without a word. Wilful, Paul decided, temperamental, like a well-bred race horse. He waited until Steve was safely in the car beside him and then drove off.

  ‘It’s my belief,’ Paul resumed a few moments later, ‘that you did speak to me on the telephone, Miss Maxwell, that you made the appointment and then changed your mind at the last minute. I suspect you gave poor Miss Jameson a pretty accurate briefing, and that her story about three attempts having been made to kill you was true.’

  She tossed her head so that the long blonde hair bounced angrily on her shoulders. ‘If I’d taken the trouble to make an appointment I should have kept it.’

  The house was seventeenth century with early Victorian embellishments. It was much larger than it had appeared in the perspective of the valley. Paul drew up by the huge oak doors of the entrance. Almost immediately a young man came round the side of the house.