“They’d have got her straight into a car and out to the airport. I wonder how they worked a passport for her? She’s not the passport class.”
The real puzzle, it appeared to me, consisted in her being so evidently not the Hugo St Swithin class. Unless her wretched husband was in the printing trade, it seemed odd that he should have had any access to the unpublished Death by Water. But now Freddie was standing obstinately rooted to the ground, staring sightlessly up the canyon of the Rio di Palazzo at the Bridge of Sighs. Within a stone’s throw of us, da Ponte’s dreadful prison jostled with the Gothic façade of Freddie’s luxurious hotel. I don’t know whether this juxtaposition came to Freddie with any of the force of symbol, increasing his irrational sense of responsibility for the man Fishley in his London cell. But certainly it was with emphasis that he repeated his last question. “What does she want me to do?”
“They didn’t bring her because there’s anything that you can do.” Miss Green put what I thought was a thoroughly wholesome emphasis into this. “They brought her simply as a bloody stunt.”
“But she must have wanted to come. She must believe I can do something. And in that case she’s entitled to talk to me. We must find her.”
Miss Green shook her head. “She’ll be pretty well in the air again by now. Minutes count in getting those photographic plates back to London.”
“But that’s outrageous!” Freddie was suddenly very angry. “Why was she hurried away from me? At least I could have talked to her kindly. And how can I be sure there wasn’t some reason in her – in her application?”
“Now, sir, we’ll just be getting along to your rooms.” Cuff, seeing us halted obstinately on the bridge, had turned back to coax Freddie on. The two policemen were immobile again behind us. The decor of our little action was so operatic that they might quite appropriately have broken into choric song.
“But what did the woman have in mind?” Freddie asked this desperately. “I can see that she has been hideously exploited, and that bringing her out to Venice has been heartless nonsense. But what’s her idea? However crazy, just what is it?”
Cuff hesitated. “We know her husband’s the man, sir. I ought to make it plain that we’re certain of that. Our business is simply to make sure of conviction by showing a clear line back from him to your book. What somebody has put in this woman’s head is that you might manage, if you thought about it, to find a clear line leading elsewhere. I can only say it’s rubbish, sir. We know it was this man Fishley who murdered her stepson.”
“In fact, who murdered his own boy – and in that way?”
“Just that, sir. You’d say it was unbelievable, if you didn’t know the background. Sexual promiscuity, drink – and of course a very low mentality all round. That’s the main positive correlation with homicide, you know, sir: very low mental development.”
“Yes, of course.” Freddie, in whose St Swithin universe judges and scientists and cabinet ministers regularly shot and stabbed and poisoned each other against a background of English country-house life, gave a dazed agreement to this. “But I still don’t understand. If she was committing adultery with her stepson, and if her husband killed him, why is she so desperate to save her husband now?”
There was silence – a silence in which I could hear a little wind blowing through the Bridge of Sighs. To such questions, Cuff was in effect soberly saying, policemen have no answers.
“Could you stop that photograph?” Crisply, Miss Green brought up a practical issue. “Could you stop the whole line those people are going to take?”
“Just what line are they going to take?” I asked. But felt I knew.
“They’re going to plug it that it was Mr Seston who set the ball rolling, so to speak, in Golder’s Green. And that it’s up to him to do everything in his power to back Mrs Fishley in her heroic fight for her husband’s acquittal.”
“And they’re quite right.” Freddie stirred from his immobility, and I thought he was going to walk on to the hotel. But he only moved to the farther balustrade and gazed out over the basin of St Mark’s. “Oh, my God!” I heard him murmur to the night.
I wasn’t the less distressed because the familiar muted note of Freddie’s self-dramatisation sounded in this. I turned to Cuff. “A devil of a mess you’ve created, Inspector, by publicising the business of the book at all.”
“That’s as may be, sir.” Cuff was impassive. “As for the photograph, I’ll get through to London from Mr Seston’s hotel. If the Commissioner could persuade the Minister to say a word at proprietor’s level, something might be done about getting the whole line dropped. Something can sometimes be done, you know, by what might be called the gentleman’s approach.” Cuff paused. “But not much,” he added drily. “And of course the time-factor usually beats one. I haven’t much hope.”
Cuff sounded genuinely concerned, and I could see that his high regard for Freddie continued. But it wasn’t, as it happened, to survive. It wasn’t to survive the final strange encounter of this notable Venetian night.
Chapter Six
We parted from Miss Green, firmly yet in charity, before the portals of Freddie’s hotel. We parted from our operatic escort, who withdrew into the darkness with all the dignity of a Doge and an attendant Serrenissimo or Clarissimo upon a state occasion. Cuff went to put through his telephone call to London. My friend and I – not, I fear, without a certain hurrying and skulking effect – made for the sanctuary of our private apartment. The very stones of Venice – we were now not above thinking – were capable of sprouting Fleet Street ears.
“Your family won’t be getting anxious about you? Would you care for a drink? I expect they have pretty reasonable brandy here. Or whisky? I know they’re thoroughly sound on that.” Honestly solicitous, but at the same time abstracted and ill at ease, Freddie hovered restlessly in the middle of the room. “It’s a shocking thing to have got you mixed up with on a holiday, Jonathan. I’m afraid you’ll appear in that photograph, too. You’re sure they won’t mind?”
This was presumably a recurrence of Freddie’s notions on the iron discipline of the legal profession. He had come to feel, I suppose, that he was no better than an associate of habitual criminals, and that my acquaintance with him might cost me my gown and wig. On this small point, I endeavoured again to set his mind at rest. And believing that neither brandy nor whisky was likely to do either of us an atom of good, I had the thought to suggest a cigar. Freddie brightened and picked up a telephone at once. When the cigars came he urged upon me a specimen of immoderate dimensions – a fuss which his normal good manners would have kept him a mile from if he hadn’t been badly rattled still. And then he had the whole lot left for the inspection of Cuff. “I wish they’d stop singing,” he said.
I hadn’t been aware of the singing, but I heard it now. The basin of St Mark’s must be the largest effective auditorium in the world. When, as quite often happens, someone takes to singing on it late at night, the effect, although not in fact laid on for tourists, is apt to strike sensitive persons that way. They didn’t, they feel, come to Venice to be assaulted in this crude Hollywood fashion. Freddie seemed to be responding like this now. He even made to close the window, but desisted as the singing faded in the direction of the Grand Canal. “That poor chap in gaol,” he said. “It’s a dreadful thought.”
I wanted to tell Freddie roundly that this was an idiotic remark, since a man who encompasses his son’s death by means of a lethal machine has absolutely no title to be anywhere else. But I decided to take up something different. “Do you know about Fishley’s occupation?” I asked. “It appears that he’s a wholesale fishmonger’s clerk.”
Freddie managed to smile faintly. “How very absurd.”
“Perhaps so. But it strikes me as being not so much absurd as odd. Do you remember that poem you used to spout about ‘the fascination of what’s difficult’?”
Freddie stared. “Yes, of course. Yeats.”
“Quite so. Well, I think it’s the
fascination of what’s difficult that has taken possession of our friend Cuff. How on earth is he going to tie up your unpublished novel with a wholesale fishmonger’s clerk?”
Freddie seemed not very interested in this problem. “The tie up must be there – so presumably it can be traced. And clearly Cuff feels that if he only goes on badgering me he’ll succeed. It’s tiresome, but one can’t blame him. And of course there are all sorts of possibilities. Fishley may have a friend in a printing- works, or something of that sort.” Freddie paused at a knock on the door. “Cuff, I suppose.” He sighed, and then called out, “Entri”
It was in fact a servant. He advanced upon Freddie holding a large silver salver which appeared at first to be entirely empty. Then we saw that it was being used for the presentation of a visiting-card. Freddie picked this up and looked at it dubiously. “II signore aspetta,” the man said.
“It must be another horrible journalist.” Freddie handed me the card. “Don’t you think?”
I examined it with all the concentration which Cuff might have brought to bear upon a promising clue. “Well, no,” I said. “Or not unless it’s a trick. It’s grubby.”
“Journalists are grubby.”
I was struck by this as the only ungenerous remark I had ever heard Freddie make. “But as well as being grubby,” I went on, “it’s yellowed round the edges.”
“The gentleman is waiting,” the servant said in a good American accent. He clearly found our misgivings odd.
“So it is. You’d think it had lain in a drawer for years,” Freddie said.
“Or been carried about for years in a pocket-book. You’ve never heard of Mr Cyril Loakes?” This was the name on the card.
Freddie shook his head. “I’m sure I haven’t. Isn’t there an address in the corner?”
“It says, ‘Care of Messrs Cherril and Cherril. Have you ever heard of them?”
Again Freddie shook his head. “I don’t think so. But wait a minute! It does seem to ring a bell. But very far back. One doesn’t hear it now. It was vaguely familiar a long time ago. What should we do? Wait for Cuff? He’s being a long time over that telephone-call.”
“No.” I spoke decidedly, although I don’t think I could have given a reason why. “I think we’ll have Mr Cyril Loakes up at once.”
It appeared that Freddie had come to rely upon my judgment entirely. He turned to the servant. “Chieda il signore entrare,” he said with care.
Like everybody turning up on us on this surprising day, Mr Loakes was a London type. But he certainly hadn’t Miss Green’s contemporary quality. I had the sensation – which was certainly fallacious – of having constantly observed him in tubes and buses between the wars, and of nothing much having happened to him since, unless it was the imparting of a tinge of green to his dark shabby clothes and his bowler hat. For he did have – he did positively here in Venice hold with both hands before his meagre chest – an ancient bowler hat. And he was ancient himself – being unlikely, at least, to see seventy again. He had a high domed skull, quite bald, which at first impression suggested an intellectual cast. But then one saw that his features had been weak even before the years had set about a rather painfully successful task of erosion or obliteration. His eyes in particular, which peered out from behind old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles, expressed a gentleness and sensitiveness that had somehow gone wrong. It was, above all, defeat that was chiefly written all over him. His very shoulders spoke of it, as if from long stooping over a ledger which he hadn’t finally held down.
Loakes made a bow that didn’t quite go with this last conjecture. Briefly put, he might have been an Oriel man too. But this didn’t make the spectacle of him any more comfortable or reassuring. “Mr Seston?” he said to Freddie.
Freddie nodded. “I am Frederick Seston,” he replied, I thought with commendable briskness.
“Might I solicit the honour of a few minutes private conversation?”
Freddie glanced at me uncertainly – chiefly, perhaps, because he found this formal mode of address disconcerting. I seized my opportunity. “I am a legal friend of Mr Seston’s,” I said. “For reasons which I won’t detail, he is seeing strangers only in my presence. If you care to state your business, please do so. The hour is getting rather late.”
“Quite so—oh, quite so.” There was some deep hostility in Loakes; nevertheless he would always, I saw, lead off with a weak agreement to anything one said. He looked from the one to the other of us uneasily. “It’s quite above board,” he said. “Nothing I’d object to there being a witness to. Nothing at all. But a discreet witness, of course.” He put his hat down on a table and laid a pair of worn gloves beside it. They appeared to have been long sucked or nibbled at the tips. “I’ve had great difficulty in finding you,” he said. “I just knew it was Venice. Your publisher told me that much. Cagey people. And quite right, of course – particularly when it’s one of their most successful authors that’s in question.” For the first time Loakes looked around him. “Very pleasant quarters,” he said. “A handsome suite. And, I believe, a world- famous hotel.” He took a deep breath, as if there were some special aroma too to be savoured at Danieli’s. “And of course,” he went on, “there was another difficulty: money.” He brought out this last word with a great effect of well-bred directness which somehow horribly emphasised his tarnished quality. “It’s often a difficulty – after banking hours, that is to say. I’ve no doubt that even you have experienced that.”
Freddie produced a murmur of agreement. I could see that he was feeling awkward about our half-smoked cigars.
“Of course,” Loakes went on, “there’s always one’s club, or an obliging tradesman. But one hesitates. Fortunately I managed to run old Cherril to earth. So discreet a man – it’s quite surprising that he—um—failed as he did. I was able to persuade him that there might be something in it for him too. I persuaded him, I mean, that you and I should have a talk. So he produced the money. Even so, I had to come through Austria, since that’s the cheapest way. Not a comfortable journey, not a comfortable journey at all. However, here I am.”
I found myself disliking Loakes. “Would you be so good,” I said, “as to come more directly to the object of your visit?”
“Yes, of course—but of course. A thousand pardons! I was mentioning the difficulty of money. But there was another difficulty – and a very odd one. I had to find a copy of the book. I’m sure you know”—Loakes addressed himself to Freddie—”how one’s own copies tend to seep away. Film contracts, some question of translation, constant calls of that sort. All the more so, when one hasn’t been putting out new stuff for some time. I expect you’ve noticed the absence of my name lately. The fact is, I have made a pause in order to study the market. I’m sure you know how wise that is from time to time. There have been difficulties, I admit. You might almost call them discouragements. The fact that Cherril and Cherril went out of business was a great complication. So I have been studying the market, as I say.”
Freddie had listened to all this in hopeless perplexity. Now a glimmering seemed to come to him. “Do I understand,” he asked, “that you are a writer?”
Something odd happened to the dry abraded face of the old man before us; it was as if he had been struck smartly on either cheek. Behind the gold-rimmed spectacles his indecisive eyes took on a sudden glint that could only have been anger. And he ignored the question. “But as it happened,” he continued, “I ran a copy to earth without much difficulty. Here it is.”
For a moment Loakes fumbled ineffectively with the pocket of his overcoat. Then he brought out a book and laid it carefully on the table beside his hat. “From one of the fourpenny libraries,” he said. “My books always hold their place on the shelves there very well, I’m glad to say. In time, of course, they don’t have quite the freshness one would wish – not quite the mint quality that bibliophiles prize.” Loakes laughed unsteadily at what was evidently a joke. He was now under stress of considerable emotion. “It’
s true that cellophane helps. A wonderful invention. The dust-jackets last so much longer under it. I wonder, Mr Seston, whether your own copy is in much better condition than this one?”
I joined Freddie in staring at the murky object that had been produced for us. The name Cherril and Cherril had now identified itself in my mind as that of an obscure firm of publishers which had disappeared at least twenty years before. And here was one of their ventures: Murder in the Nude, by Cyril Loakes. The pictorial dust-jacket had in a fashion been preserved – not with cellophane but with glue and varnish. Even so, it had been thumbed and grimed virtually to vanishing point. But I could see that it represented a bathroom. At once I glanced swiftly at Freddie. It was absolutely clear to me that the thing meant nothing to him at all.
“Nobody knows.” The weak, disconcertingly cultivated voice of Loakes had gone husky from the sense that the crisis of his negotiation was approaching. “Nobody knows, except old Cherril and myself. And it’s quite likely that nobody ever will know – unless they’re told.” His laugh had gone yet shakier. “I don’t, I assure you, overestimate my own fame. And this was my very first, you know. 1921. The year of Norman Douglas’s They Went. Not nearly such a good book, alas, as South Wind.” Loakes paused for a moment, and I realised that this digression represented a queer feeling out for some sort of cultural solidarity with us. “To be quite frank, this may have been the last copy of Murder in the Nude to survive even in a fourpenny. I got it quietly away by paying ten-pence deposit and without giving my name. And the queer thing is that it must be the very copy Fishley read.”
Freddie took a horrified step backwards. He still didn’t comprehend the situation, but at least this ghastly statement came home to him. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Fishley’s sister used that branch. I found out that rather cleverly. And it’s more than the police will.”
The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories Page 7