Falling Star

by Patricia Moyes

  “The older people, perhaps,” I said, and then realized that it was not the most tactful of remarks. However, Emmy didn’t mind. She was in her early forties, and looked younger, and she didn’t care who knew it. In any case, it would not have occurred to her to take such a remark personally.

  She answered, thoughtfully, “Yes, you’re right. Robert Meakin wasn’t at all what the teenagers are after these days. He was the epitome of feminine taste in men about fifteen years ago. Now, Fiametta Fettini…”

  “…is a spoilt, selfish guttersnipe and a bloody nuisance, if you want the truth,” I said.

  Emmy opened her eyes wide. “Is she really? She looks so adorable, like a fluffy black kitten.”

  “She’s got the brains of a fluffy kitten and the claws of a full-grown, bad-tempered tigress.”

  “How disillusioning you are, Pudge. I wish I’d never asked you about her. Surely she must have some good qualities?”

  Before I had time to answer, there was the sound of a key in the front door, and Emmy said, “There’s Henry.” A moment later Henry Tibbett came in.

  I have already mentioned that he looked as little like a great detective as any man could, with his slight physique, undistinguished features, and mild blue eyes. However, people who were better qualified to judge than I apparently had the highest opinion of his talents, and I presumed that he would not have reached his present position without a certain amount of ability. I can only say that he did not give much outward sign of it. He came into the room quietly, almost diffidently, poured himself a drink, and chatted about the weather.

  At last, when we had established that it had been a cool day for the time of year, but might easily rain tomorrow, Henry Tibbett settled himself in a large, shabby arm chair and got down to business.

  “I’m really very sorry to worry you with this, Croombe-Peters,” he said, “but, frankly, I don’t know quite what action to take, and I hope you can help me.”

  “Certainly, if I can,” I said politely. It was, I considered, a pretty shilly-shallying way for a senior detective to go on, but that was none of my business.

  “The other day,” said Henry, “you telephoned me about a girl who committed suicide. Your ex-Continuity Girl, Margery Phipps.”

  “That’s right. I’m glad to say that your guess was correct; we haven’t been bothered by the press at all.”

  “That,” said Henry, “is because nobody knows that she used to work for you.”

  “Oh, rubbish,” I said. “Everybody must know. We all…”

  “She was apparently a very secretive character,” Henry went on, ignoring my interruption. “She had few friends, and those that she had knew very little about her. The closest friend she had, it seems, was a girl named Sarah Prentiss, who used to go to theaters and concerts with her. All that Sarah Prentiss knew was that she worked for a firm in Soho, and that she had recently given up her job. The detectives who searched her flat after the suicide found absolutely no personal papers whatsoever, just the suicide note. I presume that she must have been a member of a trade union to be allowed to work on a film?”

  “Most emphatically,” I said with feeling.

  “Well,” Henry went on, “we couldn’t even find a union card among her things. It was all rather mysterious.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Margery was a quiet, secret sort of person, but there was no mystery about her that I know of. The union will have all her particulars.” There was a short silence.

  As Henry did not seem inclined to start the conversation going again, I could not resist putting bluntly into words what had been in my mind ever since his telephone call that afternoon. “The last time I spoke to you,” I said, “you described Margery’s death as a routine suicide. Why are you suddenly so interested in her?”

  Henry was filling his pipe, and spun this operation out with unnecessary attention to detail. For the first time in my acquaintance with him, he seemed to be at a loss for words.

  At last he said, “Well, I know it all sounds rather silly, but it’s because of this woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “I’ll try to explain it to you as best I can,” said Henry. “As you know, Margery Phipps left a note addressed to Mrs. Cyril Phipps, at an address in Kensington. Mrs. Phipps was contacted at once, and proved to be a charming, intelligent, and well-educated woman in her late fifties, a widow. The Superintendent told her the news and gave her Margery’s note. She was apparently very upset. She said that although she did not see a great deal of Margery these days, she and her daughter had always been devoted to each other and kept in touch by telephone. She could not imagine why Margery should have killed herself. It was true that the girl was moody and even her own mother found her secretive and sometimes difficult to understand. Mrs. Phipps could only presume that there had been some tragedy—probably an unhappy love affair—but she could not supply any details.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What about the note?”

  “Ah, yes,” said Tibbett. “The note. I’m coming to that. In fact, I’ll show you a transcript of it. It’s a suicide note all right—no doubt about that—but it’s couched in pretty vague terms, as though Margery had expected her mother to know all about the affair—whatever it was. But Mrs. Phipps maintains that she has no inkling about what drove the poor girl to kill herself.”

  “I don’t see what all this has to…”

  “Please,” said Henry. He sounded tired, and also embarrassed. “Let me explain it in my own way. Superintendent Wilcox was in charge of the inquiries, and it was he who interviewed Mrs. Phipps and generally coped with the case. If it hadn’t been for your telephone call, I would never have heard of the girl at all. It had nothing to do with me. But then this woman turned up.”

  “What woman? You keep talking about a woman…”

  “Mrs. Arbuthnot, her name is. From Lewisham.”

  “My dear Tibbett,” I said—I could not repress a smile—“this is becoming most delightfully complicated. Who or what is Mrs. Arbuthnot, and how does she come into the affair?”

  Tibbett grinned. “She comes into it,” he said, “because she literally camped outside my office for two days and refused to budge. She simply turned up at the Yard, demanding to see me and nobody else, and refused to say what it was about. She informed the Duty Sergeant that she had taken the train up from Lewisham to come to Scotland Yard direct, because, as she put it, she knew a thing or two about the local police, thank you very much. When she was told that she could not see me, she simply produced a package of ham sandwiches and a Thermos flask and proceeded to lay siege to the Yard. The Sergeant interviewed her again, and this time she volunteered the information that her visit concerned what she described as ‘the mysterious death of Miss Margery Phipps.’ The Sergeant was in a dilemma, poor chap. He’s a kindly soul, and Mrs. Arbuthnot’s dogged determination had impressed him. Besides, he was haunted by the idea that she might have something important to say. Anyhow, to cut a long story short, he came to me very apologetically this morning and told me all about it, and I agreed to see the woman…”

  One thing I will say for Tibbett, he has a gift for telling a story. As he spoke, I could almost see Mrs. Arbuthnot, in her crushed black straw hat and shabby black coat, following her sharply pointed nose warily into Henry’s office. So I’m proposing to tell you about the interview just as Tibbett told it to me.

  She came in, he said, as though she were expecting an ambush. She could not have been much more than fifty years old, but her face was deeply lined and her hands roughened by hard work.

  “Chief Inspector Tibbett, is it?” she asked distrustfully. Her voice was not Cockney. It had, rather, the mournful whine of the southern suburbs of London. There was even a distressing attempt to be genteel. Henry admitted his identity, and proffered a chair.

  “It’s taken me a good two days to get to see you,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot accusingly. She sat down and pulled the black coat tighter around her skinny waist. “
Obstruction, all the way.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Henry. “These things have to go through what are called the normal channels. You see, Mrs. Arbuthnot, it’s rather unusual for a member of the public to insist upon seeing…”

  “If you don’t have the right to see a detective when your daughter’s been murdered, I don’t know when you do,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.

  This took Henry aback, as can be imagined. “Your daughter’s been murdered?” he repeated, rather foolishly.

  “Yes. My daughter. Margery Phipps. Murdered. Don’t you understand English?”

  “Just a minute, Mrs. Arbuthnot. First of all, Margery Phipps committed suicide. There’s no doubt about that. And secondly, she was not your daughter. She left a note addressed to her mother, Mrs. Cyril Phipps of…”

  “Foster mother,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot with scorn. “Wanted to adopt her, but I wasn’t having any of that. So she got Margery’s name changed to Phipps, so as to look better. But Margery was my girl, and I’m telling you she was murdered.”

  At this point Henry took a pull at his pipe, and said, “I may as well telescope things a little here, and tell you that Mrs. Arbuthnot’s story was perfectly true, at least as far as Margery’s birth was concerned. I checked up at once, and found that Margery had been taken in as a foster child by Mrs. Phipps at the age of six months. It was also true that Mrs. Phipps and her husband, when he was alive, had made great efforts to adopt the child legally, but had always been foiled by the iron determination of the real mother not to relinquish her right to her child. However, all this appeared to have nothing to do with Margery’s death, and I said as much to Mrs. Arbuthnot.

  “I explained all the circumstance to her, Margery’s work on Street Scene—she seemed to know all about that—and her resignation from the job. It was perfectly clear that for some reason she had decided to take her own life. At this point Mrs. Arbuthnot interrupted.”

  “For some reason! What reason would that be, I’d like to know?”

  “We don’t know the precise reason, Mrs. Arbuthnot, but she left a note addressed to her mother—that is, to Mrs. Phipps—making it clear that…”

  “And she wrote a note to me, her real mother, the very same day!”

  Mrs. Arbuthnot fumbled in her enormous, well-worn handbag, and produced a letter, written in the same definitive hand that Henry recognized from the suicide note.

  “Dear Mum,” it read, “Just a line to tell you that I’m doing well, so don’t worry. In fact, I’m on to something pretty big and exciting, and I just wish Dad were here to see me in action. I’ll write again soon—I may need your help. Love, Margery.”

  Henry read the note carefully, and then looked up. “Well?” he said.

  “Does that sound like a girl who’s going to throw herself out of a seventh-story window?” Mrs. Arbuthnot demanded aggressively.

  “I’m afraid, Mrs. Arbuthnot,” said Henry, “that it’s useless trying to make sense of the way people behave. Here at Scotland Yard, we have to go on facts; and the fact is that your daughter killed herself. It’s a great tragedy, and you may be sure we are all very sympathetic, but…”

  Abruptly, Mrs. Arbuthnot sheered off onto a new line of thought. “What about the will?” she asked.

  “That’s quite outside my province, I’m afraid,” said Henry. “If there was a will, it must have been found among your daughter’s belongings. If not, it would be a matter for lawyers to decide whether you or Mrs. Phipps should inherit. I would say that your claim would be stronger in law, but I’m only guessing.”

  “You mean, I’d get everything?”

  “I think so.”

  “What I mean,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, with a strange mixture of diffidence and cunning, “I read the other day about a man left a fortune by his uncle and couldn’t lay hands on a penny of it. Lipstick or some such name, it was.”

  Henry said, “I think you must mean Alexander Lipovitch, the novelist.”

  “I dare say. It was some sort of foreign name.”

  “That case was quite different, Mrs. Arbuthnot. The uncle committed suicide, leaving a will which directed that the nephew should inherit the proceeds from a large life insurance policy; but there was a clause in the insurance policy rendering it null and void in the case of suicide. I hardly imagine that your daughter…”

  “Not that the Lipstick man needed the money, from what it said in the papers. Rolling in the stuff already. Not like most of us.”

  “Really, Mrs. Arbuthnot,” said Henry, “this isn’t my line of country at all. I would advise you and your husband to go to a solicitor…”

  “My husband’s dead.” Mrs. Arbuthnot sounded irritated at the fact. “Six months ago, he went. That cold snap in March. Bronchitis turned to pneumonia. I did at least think I’d have Margery to look after me in my old age. What’s going to happen to me now, I’d like to know?”

  According to Tibbett, as he told me the story, it was at this point that he managed to get rid of Mrs. Arbuthnot as tactfully as possible. I can imagine what this involved, the usual Tibbett mixture of stubbornness and flattery which would have charmed the birds off a tree and left them no time to reflect that they had left a nest and fledglings on the topmost branch. I often wondered why Henry Tibbett had not become a confidence man. He would have been a huge success.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s all very amusing and interesting, but I don’t see what it has to do with me.”

  “Have another drink,” said Henry. He got up and refilled our glasses, and then he said, “I was somehow intrigued by Mrs. Arbuthnot. I suppose it was my—a sort of instinct.”

  I knew him well enough to know that the word he had avoided using was “nose.” Tibbett’s admirers maintain that he has a sort of sixth sense when it comes to crime, a facility to which he refers as his “nose.” I knew, too, that he had an understandable reluctance to talk about this nonsensical and totally imaginary attribute. On this occasion, he sidestepped it quickly and went on. “Purely on impulse I sent for all the papers concerning Margery Phipps. As I’ve told you, they confirmed Mrs. Arbuthnot’s story. Margery was the daughter of Lily Arbuthnot of 12 Inkerman Terrace, Lewisham. On the birth certificate, the father was entered as ‘unknown.’ There were documents to prove that when the child was six months old, she had been handed over to foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. Cyril Phipps of Barons Court. There had never been an official adoption order, but at the age of sixteen Margery’s name had been changed by deed poll from Arbuthnot to Phipps. After I’d studied all these papers, I decided to have another word with Mrs. Arbuthnot.”

  “Why?” I asked. Frankly, I was beginning to get a little bored by the whole thing, and I had a dinner appointment at nine o’clock.

  “Because of the inconsistency,” said Henry.

  “What inconsistency? Apparently everything that the woman had said was true, and she was just…”

  “No,” said Henry. “There was that small entry ‘father unknown.’ It was perfectly reasonable and probable that Mrs. Arbuthnot—or, more correctly, Miss Arbuthnot—would invent a fictitious and defunct husband; but it seemed rather unlikely that she would have placed his death a mere six months ago, and supplied me with details of his last illness. Besides, it appeared from the letter she had that Margery, too, had known her real father. Of course, the obvious explanation was that after the child’s birth, her mother had settled down to an illegal state of domestic bliss with some other man, whom Margery had regarded as her father. Still, I wasn’t entirely happy. So I telephoned Mrs. Arbuthnot and asked her for a few details about her husband.

  “At first, she sounded quite taken aback. Then she told me that his name was Fred, Frederick Arbuthnot. I asked what his profession was, and she said he was an undertaker. Then, rather surprisingly, she said, ‘Fred wouldn’t have stood for it, if he’d been here. He’d never have nothing to do with murder, Fred wouldn’t.’

  “The next thing I did was to put through a call to the police station at Lewisham
. I know the Superintendent there quite well. A nice fellow, and very good at his job. I told him that I’d like some information from him and that it might take some time to dig it out. I wanted a bit of background on one Frederick Arbuthnot, undertaker of 12 Inkerman Terrace, who had died of pneumonia last March. To my surprise, the Super began to laugh.

  “‘What’s so funny?’

  “‘What’s the idea, Inspector?’ he asked. ‘Intelligence and initiative tests for local forces?’

  “‘Certainly not. I merely asked…’

  “The Super gave a great guffaw. ‘Undertaker!’ he rumbled. ‘That’s rich. Not a bad description, either. Reckon there wasn’t much he wouldn’t undertake. But he liked his clients alive and kicking.’

  “‘I’m told he didn’t hold with murder.’

  “‘Dear me, no. He was the old-fashioned type of criminal, very set in his ways. He had his own set of morals, and very rigid they were. You don’t get ’em like that any more.’ Believe me, the Super sounded really regretful about it. ‘Layabouts, the new young crowd are, ready to dabble in any sort of dirt going, including violence. Indiscriminate. The day of the specialist is just about over.’

  “I asked what Fred Arbuthnot’s specialty had been. The Super sounded really surprised. ‘You mean you don’t know? You weren’t pulling my leg?’

  “‘I certainly wasn’t. I can’t be personally acquainted with every criminal in the country, specialist or not.’

  “‘Still, I did think you’d have heard of Doctor Sam, as the papers called him.’

  “‘Of course I’ve heard of Doctor Sam. But his name wasn’t…’

  “‘He changed his name about once a week,’ said the Super. ‘Very confusing, it was. But his favorite alibis were nearly all some sort of variation on Samuel Johnson. I’ve known him arrested as Sir Samuel Johns, Colonel Samson Jobson, Doctor St. John Samuel, and so on. It’s really rather interesting. It wasn’t until he died in Wormwood Scrubs last March that we found out what his real name was. You’ll never guess.’