‘Don’t be too sure. You may be in for a surprise.’ Helen smiled. ‘I’m hoping you’ll find him chastened. I told him this morning he had to stop behaving like a bear with a sore head, snapping at me every time I looked in on him. That I had no magic wand I could wave to make him feel better. He would just have to be patient.’
Not altogether encouraged by her words—patience had never been his old friend’s strong suit—Madden had contrived to avoid passing by his cottage on his way to the farm that morning. But now, with no further reason to delay, he waved goodbye to Burrows and set off down the winding road that led to the bottom of the valley, where there was a stream with a path running alongside it that passed by the chief inspector’s abode.
• • •
‘Wing, you say? The oriental gentleman? I didn’t speak to him myself, but Derry took a dislike to him, I recall. He was planning to question him again, and in more detail. But then Norris was arrested.’
Seated in the shade of an apple tree, with his foot, garbed in a loose felt slipper, resting on a well-cushioned stool, Angus Sinclair frowned.
‘We had nothing on him. Other than the fact that he’d brought the Blake woman down to Kent with him, there was no reason to connect him to the murder. Has Derry got some new information?’
Madden shook his head. ‘It was just a feeling he had at the time. He thought Wing was a dubious character. And he didn’t like the way he reacted to Miss Blake’s death; or rather that he didn’t react. He seemed unmoved by it.’
‘The Kent police had already done the preliminary interviews by the time I got down there,’ the chief inspector explained. ‘The guests had all been questioned. I did have a word with Sir Jack Jessup, but he wasn’t able to help. He was too upset. He seemed to take the view that he was personally responsible for the safety and well-being of anyone staying under his roof. I felt sorry for the man.’
Shifting in his chair, Sinclair grimaced with pain. Madden waited for the explosion he was sure would follow. Instead, to his surprise, a pained grin appeared on the chief inspector’s face.
‘I can see you’re holding your breath. Have no fear. I’m a reformed character.’
He re-settled himself carefully.
‘I got a fearful wigging from Helen yesterday. She said I was behaving like of one of those gout-ridden colonels in a Punch cartoon whose toe has just been stepped on. I was reduced to shame-faced silence.’
Madden had already noted that his old colleague seemed in better spirits that day and had attributed the change to the presence of his daughter—a great favourite of the chief inspector’s—whom he had found setting the garden table for tea when he arrived. Lucy had walked down from the house with a plate of freshly baked scones and accompanied by the Maddens’ basset hound, Hamish, another welcome visitor and one with whom Sinclair was wont to claim a special tie, though admittedly only on the basis of the dog’s name.
‘You will admit,’ he had said to Helen once, ‘that while he never ceases to dig holes in your garden, he has always left mine untouched. It’s clear he accords me special dispensation as a fellow Scot.’
The chief inspector was especially proud of his roses, now at the height of their full-blown summer beauty, and before Madden sat down to have tea with them both, he had spent ten minutes watering the beds under the approving eye of their temporarily stricken owner.
Her duty done, Lucy had departed, rousing Hamish from his deep sleep on the grass beside Sinclair’s chair so that he could accompany her. Before leaving she had warned both of them that she expected to be kept fully informed on the progress of their inquiries.
‘You’re not to keep this case to yourselves,’ she had told them sternly. ‘It’s much too interesting. If two heads are better than one, then three are better than two. I’m sure if you let me put my mind to it I’ll come up with some good ideas.’
Seated in a cane chair now, with the sun lower in the sky, but the day still warm, Madden ran through the main points of the meeting he had had with Chubb at Scotland Yard.
‘He’s not dead set against re-opening the case, Angus. But as Billy Styles says, he needs a good reason to do it. Cradock may be more of a problem. He’s afraid of raking it all up again; he dreads what the papers will make of the story. We’ll have to tread carefully. I promised Charlie I’d be discreet.’
‘What have you got in mind?’ The chief inspector listened patiently while he made his report.
‘Well, first off, I’m going to ring this woman Portia Blake shared a flat with, an actress called Audrey Cooper. We need to know if she can identify the pendant.’
Madden had brought the jade figurine with him and Sinclair had been examining it while he listened, holding it up to the sunlight and tracing the faint flaw in the green stone with the tip of his finger.
‘If she confirms that it’s the same one, we need to decide what to do next. My own feeling is I probably ought to talk to some of the other people who were staying at the house at the time of the murder. But that carries a danger with it.’
‘What danger?’
‘I don’t want the fact that we’re looking into this case to get out. It wouldn’t be fair to Charlie Chubb. He’s being as cooperative as he can be. He’s ready to consider anything new we come up with. It would seem like a stab in the back if he were to find the story suddenly splashed across the front page of a newspaper. We should think carefully about who we approach.’
While he was speaking, Sinclair had made another cautious move in his chair.
‘Have you any suggestions?’ he asked, having completed the manoeuvre successfully.
Madden nodded. ‘Since his father’s no longer with us, I thought Sir Richard Jessup would be the best person to approach. He didn’t stay the whole week-end, but he was present at dinner the night before Miss Blake was murdered. He could tell us something about the other guests and where they are to be found now. And, most important, he would have a strong interest in keeping this business out of the newspapers, from the points of view of both his family and his company. If you agree, I thought I’d write him a note and request an interview. He can always refuse, of course. But my guess is he would want to know what’s afoot. How the note is worded will be important: this is not an official inquiry, after all. I’ll draft something over the week-end and show it to you before I go back to London.’
He reflected for a moment.
‘And I’ll have to cook up some sort of story to tell Audrey Cooper as well. I don’t want her thinking that the police are about to open a new investigation.’
The chief inspector looked troubled.
‘I’m starting to feel guilty about this, John. You’ve already done too much. The truth is this case has become something of an obsession of mine since Derry wrote me that letter. It troubles me.’
‘And it never did before?’ Madden probed cautiously.
‘What do you mean?’ Rather as he’d feared, Sinclair responded sharply.
‘This particular investigation, it never bothered you?’
‘Did I ever wonder if we’d sent the wrong man to the gallows? Is that what you’re asking?’
The chief inspector had arrived all too quickly at the question which Madden had asked himself, and which he had decided it might be best to avoid.
‘The way Derry described it to me made me wonder if there had been any uncertainty in your mind at the time about the way Norris’s confession came about. How he suddenly caved in. Derry said he had had the feeling all along that Norris wanted to confess and had taken it as a sign of his guilt. But that now he wondered if there hadn’t been some other reason behind it.’
He waited for the other’s reaction. Sinclair’s frown had stayed fixed. But he was biting his lip now, seemingly uncertain of his reply.
‘Not at the time.’ When he spoke finally, it was in a decisive tone. ‘I was satisfied we
had the right man. As for the speed with which the whole business was wrapped up, there was nothing unusual about that. As you well know, most murder inquiries are resolved quickly; they seldom drag on. The identity of the killer is usually clear from the start, and it certainly seemed to be the case with Miss Blake’s murder. I will say this though: I was disturbed by Norris’s manner. There was something about it that didn’t seem to fit the circumstances. It was almost as though he were no longer concerned with the questions being put to him; as though he had withdrawn into some private part of his mind. Then again, murderers behave in all sorts of ways when they’re arrested. Over the years I’ve witnessed everything from defiance to abject grovelling. I was convinced of Norris’s guilt. But it left me troubled, mainly because I’m so opposed to capital punishment. I thought he was a weak-minded man who had almost certainly killed Portia Blake in a moment of panic, and probably by mistake when she tried to cry out. His execution, at which I was obliged to be present, was far closer to cold-blooded murder than any act of his. So if you’re asking whether it bothered me over the years—yes, it did. And when I received Derry’s letter with the news about this pendant I felt instinctively that I wanted to get to the bottom of it. If we made a mistake, let the world know about it. If nothing else, it might make people question whether hanging is a just and civilised punishment, or merely society’s way of exacting a brutal revenge; and beyond that to the moral problem posed by executions that turn out to be mistaken, as this one may well do.’
He stopped. Observing his old friend’s flushed and angry face, Madden kept his peace. It was left to the chief inspector finally to break the silence between them.
‘But to go back to what I was saying before, I don’t want to drag you any further into this business. If you can get Miss Cooper to confirm that the pendant is the one Portia Blake owned, that would be a great help. It might even be enough to persuade Cradock to re-open the inquiry.’
Madden shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not, Angus. Charlie has already made that clear. The assumption we’ve been working on—the one the sender of this letter to Derry is trying to sell us—is that if Norris wasn’t the killer, then the pendant must have been removed from Miss Blake’s body by the real murderer, presumably because he thought it might incriminate him. But as Charlie said, there are other possible explanations for its disappearance. I think he was echoing what Cradock had said to him, trying to break the bad news to me gently: telling me we were going to need more than that.’
Sinclair’s growl on learning this came as no surprise, and Madden quickly went on:
‘Let me do as I suggest. First I’ll speak to Miss Cooper and, depending on what she tells me, try to see Sir Richard after that. To tell the truth, after spending a morning with Derry going over the ground I’ve become rather fascinated with the case. Quite apart from the question of the pendant, there are other aspects that make me think it might be worth persevering with: the character of Portia Blake, for one. We really know very little about her, other than that she was an actress of no great distinction. Before going any further we ought to try to find out more. Miss Cooper could be of help there.’
‘You think there might be a reason she was killed?’
‘There might. And that’s reason enough to go on, at least for the time being.’ Madden smiled. ‘Besides, Lucy would never forgive me if I dropped out now.’
‘Well, if you’re determined . . .’ The chief inspector tried unsuccessfully to mask his satisfaction. ‘Is there anyone besides Jessup you feel you should speak to?’
‘Yes. Mrs Castleton. I take it you know who I mean?’
‘Of course.’ Sinclair seemed mildly surprised. ‘Jack Jessup’s companion—or should I say, mistress? But why her, in particular?’
‘She can probably give a better account of the guests than anyone else. She was the lady of the house, after all. And women are generally more observant than men.’
‘Are they?’
The chief inspector’s feigned astonishment was a sign that his good humour had been restored.
‘You’ve waited all these years to tell me that?’
6
‘SO YOU THINK THIS might have belonged to the fair Portia?’
Audrey Cooper picked up the pendant. Gaunt, with cropped, greying hair and deep grooves along either side of her mouth, the actress’s raddled cheeks, untouched by rouge or powder, showed the scourges of time. Dressed carelessly in slacks and a stained and crumpled blouse, she had clearly made little effort over her appearance. But her glance was sharp enough.
‘That’s what I’d like to find out,’ Madden said.
He had rung her the day before and, having explained why he wanted to see her, had been invited to call the following morning at her flat, which proved to be situated on the top floor of a house at the bottom of the King’s Road in Chelsea. Sunlight pouring through a grimy picture window illuminated an untidy sitting-room cluttered with books and what looked like scripts piled on tables—with a dirty plate here or there resting on top of them—and hung with framed posters and photographs of faces, most of them well known and belonging to the theatrical profession. They were sitting facing each other, Miss Cooper on a chaise longue upholstered in some faded rose-coloured material shiny with age and wear, Madden on a straight-backed chair that creaked each time he moved.
‘Or rather Mr Derry would,’ he went on. ‘He was one of the detectives who oversaw the investigation. He’s retired now. He lives in Canterbury, and since he knew I would be in London for a week or two he asked if I could help. I’m a farmer now, but I used to be with the police. That’s how we came to know each other.’
‘You said on the phone you were just helping to tie up loose ends.’ Miss Cooper spoke in a hoarse voice that Madden had fancifully associated with the cigarette burning in her fingers—it was the third she had lit since his arrival—until she apologised for her croaking and explained that she had all but lost her voice as a result of appearing recently as Lady Bracknell in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest.
‘I’m afraid my dulcet tones and Oscar’s deathless wit were lost on the cloth-eared worthies of Scarborough. They like their comedy more earthy oop north.’
Although Madden had handed her the pendant some minutes before, she had not yet done more than glance at it. It was as though she wished to examine his credentials first before giving serious attention to the matter that had brought him to her door.
‘What do you mean by loose ends?’ she asked, eyes narrowing. ‘As I recall it, a man was hanged for Portia’s murder. Is there some question about that now? And if so, why are you making this inquiry, and not the police?’
‘Well, to answer your last question first, the police are aware of the existence of the pendant, but they don’t feel it’s significant in itself. Even supposing it is the same one, there could be various explanations for its turning up like this. They certainly don’t think that it justifies re-opening the investigation.’
‘But your friend, Mr Derry, feels differently?’ Miss Cooper expelled a lungful of smoke.
‘Not at all. He was surprised to receive it, of course. It arrived out of the blue along with a note saying the sender believed it might have belonged to Miss Blake. Now, it was known that she had a pendant similar to this one—she was seen wearing it during that week-end—but it disappeared when she was murdered and what Mr Derry wants to know is whether it’s the same piece of jewellery.’
‘And that would be what you call “tying up a loose end”?’ Extinguishing her cigarette, she reached for another.
‘In effect. It’s the sort of thing old detectives obsess about. Mr Derry thinks what might have happened was that the pendant was torn off Miss Blake’s neck when she was assaulted and has been lying in the wood ever since. It’s possible someone picked it up and sent it to him; someone who thought it might interest the police, but doesn’t want to get invol
ved.’
‘And Mr Derry won’t rest easy until he knows the truth?’ Her tone was disbelieving. ‘That’s what you’re telling me?’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’ Madden shifted uneasily on his creaking chair. The fiction he was offering Portia Blake’s old flatmate had been concocted by none other than Lucy, who continued to take a lively interest in the inquiries he was making, and the longer he went on with it the less convincing it sounded to his ears. ‘What really concerns him is that if the pendant did belong to Miss Blake, then it ought to be returned to her family. I’m told she has a sister living in Ipswich.’
‘Has she? I wouldn’t know.’ Miss Cooper shrugged. ‘Portia never talked about her family: she made no bones about wanting to leave her past behind.’
‘You must have met the sister, though, surely. Didn’t she come by to collect Portia’s things?’
The actress stared at him.
‘Yes, of course she did.’ It had taken her a second or two to collect herself. She clicked her tongue in irritation. ‘I remember now. I helped her clear out Portia’s room. But that was the only time I ever set eyes on her.’
She had recovered well enough, but just for a moment Madden thought he’d detected a false note in her voice, and he wondered what had prompted it. Now, however, as though deciding on a change of strategy, the frown of suspicion creasing Miss Cooper’s brow faded. She looked thoughtful as she picked up the pendant and held it to the light. He was startled to see her put down her cigarette in an ashtray and pick up a monocle from the table beside her. She fixed it to her right eye.
‘This is not an affectation, I assure you,’ she said, as though reading his mind. ‘I’m as blind as a bat in one eye and long-sighted in the other. It’s made for some uncomfortable moments on the boards, I can tell you.’
She studied the green stone carefully, turning it this way and that to catch the light until it seemed she had found the right angle, at which point she held the pendant still and peered hard at it.
The Death of Kings Page 6