Nice Class of Corpse

by Simon Brett

  She put her dressing gown on over her nightdress and donned soft sheepskin slippers. She had contemplated more suitable clothes for investigation of the boiler room, but decided that their advantages were outweighed by the problems of explanation that might be caused if she were interrupted in her mission. An old lady wandering around at three a.m. in her night clothes could be put down to the aberrations of age; an old lady in a dark sweater and trousers might raise more searching questions.

  She put the late Mr Pargeter’s skeleton keys and pencil torch in her dressing-gown pocket and left her bedroom. On the landing the night safety light glowed weakly. Mrs Pargeter moved along the corridor past the bathrooms to the back stairs. She stepped, as the late Mr Pargeter had taught her, on the balls of her feet, allowing her full weight to descend slowly with each footfall, alert to the beginnings of any creak in the floorboards.

  She wafted in ghost-like silence to the ground floor. There was no light there, but she could see to locate the door down to the basement. No point in taking unnecessary risks by switching on a light.

  On the stairs to the basement, because of their unfamiliarity, she used the pencil torch, directing its beam, as the late Mr Pargeter had instructed her, exactly where she was about to place each foot. She heard the subdued roar of the boiler as she drew closer to it.

  At the foot of the stairs was a small area off which two doors opened. One would be Newth’s bedsitter and the other the boiler room. She listened for a moment at Newth’s door, and heard only reassuringly heavy breathing. Then, pulling the handle firmly towards her to stop any telltale rattling (as the late Mr Pargeter had also instructed her), she opened the door to the boiler room.

  A predictable blast of hot air greeted her, and her slippered foot scrunched on coke dust. Though she ran the risk of slowing her exit, she closed the door behind her to minimise noise.

  She beamed the pencil torch round the room, quickly taking in its dimensions. The old iron boiler, through a small grille of which a sullen red light glowed, dominated the space. To one side of it was a boarded-off area half-filled with a high slope of coke; above this a trap door through which the fuel was dropped. A shovel and some blackened buckets stood in front of the pile. A small heavily bolted door, which also showed the signs of a contact-breaking burglar alarm, led off the room, presumably to the yard outside.

  Mrs Pargeter was a little disappointed. She had hoped to see a pile of clinker, a sort of half-way house where the boiler’s debris would rest before being taken outside, but Newth was too organised for that. No, when he cleared out the ash-tray beneath the boiler, he took the clinker straight out to the bins or wherever else it was that he disposed of it.

  So, if, as she had planned, Mrs Pargeter was to examine what had been raked out that afternoon, she would have to wait till the exposure of daylight or risk the burglar alarms.

  She stood for a moment, undecided, then moved across towards the buckets. The crunching underfoot sounded hideously loud, but she rationalised that it was unlikely to be heard above the steady, regular roar of the boiler.

  She directed her torch down to the buckets. Again she was disappointed. Maybe she had hoped to find them still loaded with the afternoon’s clinker, but she was out of luck. The buckets were empty; only dust and ash clung to their battered sides.

  She checked her watch. Probably time to go back. Minimise risks. Try another tack, in the morning.

  She gave a final sweep with her torch to the inside of the buckets and was stopped by a dull flash from inside one of them. She brought the torch down nearer and saw the satisfying gleam of a droplet of metal clinging to the side.

  It must have spattered there while still molten, and clung to the side when the hot ash was cleared. Mrs Pargeter leant down and prised the little sliver of metal loose with her finger-nail. She popped it into her dressing-gown pocket and left the boiler room as quietly as she had arrived.

  Inside a minute she was back in her bedroom. She switched on the light and placed the scrap of metal on a tissue on her dressing table. She got out the late Mr Pargeter’s eye-glass and peered down at her trophy.

  There was no doubt about it. During her not uneventful life with her late husband, Mrs Pargeter had seen enough melted-down pieces of metal like that to recognise it instantly.

  It was a cheap alloy, silver-plated.

  And on its surface was still the blurred outline of a tracery design.

  Which she recognised as part of the setting of one of Mrs Selsby’s necklaces.

  And it confirmed Mrs Pargeter’s conjecture that all of the old lady’s jewellery had been destroyed in the boiler of the Devereux Hotel.

  27

  It had been a long five days at the Devereux, with more excitement than was normally rationed out to the hotel over as many years. The arrival of one new resident would usually have provided enough gossip-fodder for five months, and yet as well as that there had been the deaths of two other residents, visitation by the police and – more shocking than all of these – a robbery. It was sincerely hoped that they would all have a quiet weekend.

  Saturday, Mrs Pargeter had discovered, was Newth’s day off. While for most hotels the weekend was the busiest period, this was not the case at the Devereux, because all of its guests stayed on a semi-permanent basis. Indeed, often the weekends were less busy than the weekdays, as some of the residents might go off to stay with friends or surviving relatives.

  So Newth was free from the moment he had finished his breakfast routine on the Saturday (usually about nine) until twelve o’clock the next day, when he was expected to be back to help with Sunday lunch. In theory he could go anywhere he liked during that period, though in practice he always came back to the hotel to sleep on the Saturday night.

  That morning Mrs Pargeter breakfasted quickly and was out of the Admiral’s Dining Room even before Colonel Wicksteed had had time to make his remark about time and tide. She put on her mink and left the hotel. She walked briskly some fifty metres along the front, then turned up a road leading into the town. In her tour of Littlehampton on the Tuesday, amongst other essential services, she had located a garage that operated a car rental service.

  This garage, she had observed, opened for business at eight-thirty. By ten to nine she was parked on the sea front a little way away from the Devereux at the wheel of a brand-new Vauxhall Cavalier.

  Newth emerged from a side entrance promptly at nine. He was pushing a motor scooter, which he mounted and drove off at a sedate pace along the coast road towards Worthing.

  He was unaware of the Vauxhall Cavalier driving sedately behind him. There was, after all, nothing unusual about it. The roads of the South Coast are heavily populated by beautifully polished cars that never exceed the speed of a motor scooter. (Most of them, incidentally, have sunshine roofs and are driven by balding men in cravats and string-backed driving gloves, but that’s neither here nor there.)

  Mrs Pargeter did not know where she was expecting her quarry to go, but, after her discovery of the night before, anything Newth did might be significant.

  The evidence of the metal from the boiler room made her almost certain that he was responsible for the robbery from Mrs Selsby’s room. It made sense that that crime should have been committed by a member of staff. There had been no sign of forcible entry to the room, and, though she couldn’t think that many of the residents would have sets of skeleton keys like the late Mr Pargeter’s, she knew that the staff had pass keys. That fact, combined with the use of the boiler as a means of destruction, seemed to point the finger very firmly at Newth.

  Whether he was acting for himself or on someone else’s behalf, she had not yet decided. It was clear that Newth had a special status in the hotel. He certainly did things for Miss Naismith that were outside the scope of the job for which he was employed, and it was possible that he had comparable arrangements with some of the residents. He carried about him the discreet aura of a factotum, and Mrs Pargeter had the feeling that, presented with
the appropriate amount of money, there was no service he would refuse to perform.

  She had not yet worked out whether Newth’s guilt in the matter of the robbery also made him a suitable candidate for the role of murderer. The crimes were certainly linked, but the link might not be so direct. Mrs Pargeter would bide her time, and gather more information, before she formed an opinion on that.

  The motor scooter continued its unhurried course eastwards along the coast. The Vauxhall Cavalier pottered along behind. Sometimes a few vehicles came between them, but Mrs Pargeter never let Newth out of her sight.

  He drove through Worthing, still keeping as near to the sea as possible, and on into the bungaloid sprawl of Lancing. Here at last he turned inland. Mrs Pargeter, lulled into inattention by the predictability of his course, almost overshot the turning and had to brake sharply to follow.

  She didn’t have far to go. A little way up the road, Newth turned again on to the muddy road of a new development. It appeared to be a cul-de-sac, so, rather than following him in, Mrs Pargeter brought the Cavalier to a halt on the other side of the road a little way from the entrance. She could still see Newth clearly as he slowed down and parked the motor scooter.

  She reached into the glove compartment for the late Mr Pargeter’s small but very powerful binoculars. There was nobody about, so she was not worried about raising them to her eyes and focusing on the neat military figure across the road.

  The building site was, as the sign outside the entrance boasted, ‘an exclusive development of luxury bungalows’, which looked to be nearing completion. The buildings were large and well appointed, all set in generous gardens and boasting double garages. Mrs Pargeter, who had done an extensive survey of South Coast property before deciding to move into the Devereux, could price the bungalows very accurately. And the price she arrived at was high.

  Which made what Newth was doing all the more interesting.

  Although it was a Saturday, there were still a lot of men working on the site.

  Newth had walked up what would in time be the garden path of the bungalow outside which he had parked, and instantly fallen into conversation with the two men working on the garage doors. They seemed to recognise him and even show him a degree of deference. They pointed out various features of the house and then took him inside, presumably to show him more.

  Newth’s manner and reactions to what he was shown could only be described as proprietorial. He behaved exactly like someone who was buying a new house and had come along to check the progress of his acquisition.

  This gave Mrs Pargeter food for thought. Newth certainly did not have the look of a rich man, nor did the nature of his employment suggest that he was in a position to make that kind of investment. Of course, he might have private money or he might have saved assiduously through his life, but Mrs Pargeter didn’t favour either of those explanations.

  Nor could the purchase of such a house be the result of his benefits from Mrs Selsby’s death. Even if he had known the unusual provisions of her will beforehand, he couldn’t have raised money on that expectation.

  There was just no way that the luxury bungalow fitted the image of a hotel porter.

  Perhaps living so long with the late Mr Pargeter had made her over-suspicious of people whose life-style was at odds with their known income, but Mrs Pargeter felt pretty convinced that Newth was, at some level or other, on the fiddle.

  Just as she reached this conclusion, he emerged from the front of the house. Again his manner with the two builders was excessively bonhomous, almost to the point of being condescending. It was the manner of someone in charge; it did not match the silent obsequiousness that he demonstrated around the Devereux.

  He started back towards the motor scooter and, since he was now looking in her direction, Mrs Pargeter picked up the newspaper she had bought for the purpose and raised it to her face.

  Over the top of the paper, she saw something remarkable happen.

  Newth suddenly clutched at his chest, stumbled and fell.

  He hadn’t tripped over anything; his muscles just seemed to have given way. As he slumped to the ground, the two builders rushed forwards to grab his arms. One of them laid him flat on the ground, while the other hurried to the Portakabin in the middle of the site, and returned a moment later with a plastic beaker, presumably full of water or tea.

  By the time the man got back, Newth was sitting up and appeared to be protesting vigorously that he was all right. Grudgingly, at the builders’ insistence, he took a drink from the beaker; but in spite of their remonstrances, he immediately stood up and walked about, as if to demonstrate his fitness. Mrs Pargeter watched the dumb show continue, as the builders questioned whether he was all right to drive and whether they should call a doctor, while Newth protested that it was nothing and that he was as right as rain.

  At last the builders realised there was nothing they could do to break his determination, so they withdrew and let him return to the scooter. As he mounted it, he waved and called out some over-hearty remark, of which Mrs Pargeter caught the end. ‘. . . and keep up the good work. I’ll be along to check how you’re doing next week. Remember, the sooner I can get in, the happier I’ll be.’

  Which seemed to confirm that he had bought the bungalow. Mrs Pargeter was more intrigued than ever as to where he had got the money.

  The Vauxhall Cavalier followed the motor scooter discreetly and sedately back the way they had come. Mrs Pargeter drove at first in some trepidation, constantly expecting Newth to have another attack and fall off.

  But it didn’t happen. He drove safely back to the Devereux. Once inside, he went straight to his bedsitter.

  Mrs Pargeter kept her hire-car parked near the hotel, ready to follow if he decided to take another excursion. But he didn’t. He stayed in the bedsitter all day. At half-past six Mrs Pargeter saw Loxton taking a supper tray down there and was told that Newth was ‘a bit off-colour – nothing serious, just not a hundred per cent.’

  And that evening after dinner, while some of the others played bridge and she appeared to read in the Seaview Lounge, Mrs Pargeter mulled over the new facts she had found out about Newth: first, that he was a rich man, and, second, that he was a sick man.

  Oh, yes, and third – that he was almost definitely a thief.

  28

  SATURDAY

  9 MARCH – 9.30 p.m. – Well, what an exciting life I seem to be leading! Not only can I now call myself a double murderer, I have even had the police taking notice of my humble efforts. Quite a shock that was, when I heard that they’d been called in. And yet, like many of the other excitements I have undergone since I started on my recent course, it was not wholly unpleasureable. Indeed, after a life of almost unbelievable dullness, I seem to get quite a thrill out of living dangerously.

  I also gain considerable satisfaction from the ignorance of everyone else at the Devereux. They behave to me exactly as they always have, and I think I can congratulate myself on my acting for behaving as I always have. I wish I had realised earlier the pleasures of leading a double life!

  Because, in the last few days, partly perhaps because of the evidence of others’ mortality (which I have caused), I have become increasingly aware that my own time is getting short. And this thought has caused an interesting change in my attitude to my murders. Only last week I was unworried by the prospect of arrest and conviction – I just thought it might add to the excitement. But now, perhaps because I’ve seen the police come so close, I am very determined not to get caught.

  A new element has entered my life – call it the thrill of the chase, perhaps, or the appeal of a game of cat and mouse – but, whatever it is, I am determined to get away with my crimes, even if – as poor Mrs Mendlingham found out – this means committing more murders.

  In other words, anyone who I find has got near to the truth of what I have done is lining themselves up to be my next victim. The trouble is, I am beginning to develop quite a taste for murder.

  29r />
  Mrs Pargeter decided that she had got as far as she could in her investigation without enlisting outside help. Among the many invaluable legacies of the late Mr Pargeter had been his address book and, though she had rarely had occasion to use it, she knew it to be a wonderfully rich alternative Yellow Pages, which offered access to a wide variety of unexpected services.

  She decided it would be unwise to use one of the telephones at the Devereux, since they all went through the hotel switchboard and she did not wish to have her conversation overheard. So, round ten on the Sunday morning, Mrs Pargeter set out with a pocketful of change towards the public phone boxes she had located on her day of reconnaissance.

  The curtain of grey cloud had parted to let through a little grudging sunlight. The seaweed smell was strong. Mrs Pargeter breathed deeply. She felt good, healthy in body and with her mind intriguingly occupied.

  Although it had been over five years since they had spoken, she was in no doubt as to whom she should ring, but initially she met with disappointment.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said a woman’s voice at the other end. ‘I’m afraid Mr Hollingberry doesn’t live here any more.’

  ‘Oh. You don’t mean that he’s . . . away for a while but will be back?’ asked Mrs Pargeter discreetly.

  The woman had obviously never had a relative in prison, because she did not appear to understand the question. ‘No, no, he’s moved.’