Paul Temple and the Kelby Affair

by Francis Durbridge

  Hobden fidgeted uncomfortably. ‘I don’t think he had a girlfriend these last couple of years. At least, not in Melford.’

  ‘Two years ago?’

  ‘Well, there was a girl, according to rumour. But she left Melford and went off to college somewhere.’

  Charlie Vosper nodded. ‘So what was the situation then? Was there a scandal?’

  ‘I’m a policeman, Inspector Vosper, not a village barman. How would I know about Kelby’s sex life? If he had a sex life he was discreet about it, and his friends haven’t told me about the old scandals before I came.’

  ‘Before you came?’

  ‘I’ve only been responsible for this division for eighteen months. I came out from Oxford.’

  They left the police station in disgust. ‘Back to the routine enquiries,’ Charlie Vosper complained. ‘We don’t get any short cuts from the local men. What the devil happened to village life?’

  Paul telephoned Steve to say that he was coming home. Maybe they could have lunch together. Or had she eaten?

  ‘No,’ she said excitedly, ‘I’ve been trying to contact you. Did you see the obituaries in the paper this morning?’

  ‘Yes, of course—’

  ‘Sir Philip Tranmere is dead! Don’t you remember? He was the man who telephoned Lady Delamore yesterday. I told you about him.’

  Paul remembered.

  ‘He committed suicide last night.’

  Paul went off and bought another copy of The Times. It was tucked away at the foot of the column. Sir Philip Tranmere. The small photograph showed a flushed port-drinking face with military moustache and baggy eyes. He probably barked when he spoke and thought the country had gone to the dogs. But his distinguished military career had ended abruptly in 1947 when he had been arrested on suspicion of murdering Lord Delamore at a shooting party in Scotland. Some days later he had been released for lack of evidence, but that had been the end of his career.

  So much for a domestic lunch with Steve.

  Chapter 6

  THE body of Sir Philip Tranmere was in the morgue, but it explained nothing. Sir Philip had jumped out of the window at his club shortly after midnight – a hundred feet onto the pavement.

  ‘It’s really most irregular, sir,’ the club secretary repeated three times. ‘We don’t expect our members to do things like this here. The last time it happened was in 1892.’

  The secretary was more like a bank manager.

  ‘I didn’t know much about Sir Philip. He was a member before I took over. He always behaved himself, did the right thing.’ He sighed. ‘He was rather a lonely old boy, but so are many of our members. I gather he lived in a service flat in St John’s Wood. Came in three or four times a week. He can’t have lived much of a life. Nothing much to look forward to.’

  ‘He had a few things to look back on,’ said Paul. ‘Did he seem worried these last few days?’

  ‘We always took the view that the past was a long time ago,’ the secretary said reprovingly. ‘And Sir Philip was a gentleman. If he were worried he would not have confided in the barman.’

  Paul thanked him breezily and went through into the lounge. It was nearly empty. There was a man in a well-cut, blue-grey suit standing three feet back from the barman.

  ‘What I always say is,’ he was declaiming uncertainly, ‘that if you’re still alive you haven’t much to complain about.’

  The barman was not in philosophic mood. ‘We’re closing now.’ He picked up the bowler hat from his counter and tossed it to the customer. The elderly clubmen were not given the service they had been accustomed to. Although this elderly clubman was in his late forties. Paul took the hint and left. He paid an unofficial visit to a friend just down the road in Whitehall.

  ‘I’m not talking to you, Temple.’

  Paul sat comfortably in the leather armchair and relaxed. He stared around him at the oak panelling and the wall-to-wall carpet. Harry had a nice panoramic view of London from his window. He had got on since the days when he had been the youngest superintendent in the police force.

  ‘Why?’ asked Paul. ‘Is this room bugged?’

  ‘You used that information I gave you about the PPS to the Secretary of Defence. You used it in a novel. I recognised the plot.’

  ‘Come off it, Harry, you can’t even read.’

  ‘I don’t need to. I’m telepathic. You’ve come here to ask me about Sir Philip Tranmere.’

  Paul grinned. ‘You must have seen the picture in The Times this morning.’

  Harry had been in charge of the investigation into Lord Delamore’s death in 1947. Not that Paul had known him in those days. Paul had been commissioned to do a series of colour supplement articles on real-life detectives some years ago and had met Harry then. The difficulty had been that nearly all of Harry’s exploits, accurately reported, would have earned him an early retirement. The police force had taken the more sensible course of promoting him out of harm’s way.

  ‘Have a glass of port,’ said Harry.

  One thing about Harry’s elevated position, it didn’t seem to entail any work. The man just wandered about being unpleasant to everybody, bawling out his staff and terrorising criminals, and everybody loved him. He created the illusion that underneath his misanthropic waistcoat (or vest, as he called it) throbbed a human being. It was an illusion.

  Harry unlocked the false front to the bookcase and produced the drinks. He poured a substantial whisky and soda for himself, and offered Paul the decanter.

  ‘I’m cutting down on the whisky,’ he said as he closed the bookcase. ‘That’s why I keep it locked. Last week I told the Home Secretary that he wouldn’t even qualify as a filing clerk in my office. Secretary? He can’t even type. I wasn’t wrong, Paul, the man’s an idiot. But I said that at three o’clock in the afternoon. Too much whisky. I don’t normally say things like that to ministers until after eight. So I’m cutting down.’

  He raised the glass in salute.

  ‘Now, what’s this I’ve been hearing about a diary? My Inspector Vosper says it’s missing.’

  Paul nodded. ‘Someone murdered Alfred Kelby to get hold of it.’

  ‘And Rover Tranmere has committed suicide. Well?’

  ‘I wondered what went on at the shooting lodge in 1947.’

  ‘God knows,’ said Harry with a laugh. ‘There were about fifteen people staying there, including the secretary and a couple of servants, and they were suffering from what we used to call the three As. Affluence, adultery and alcohol. It was a hot summer and I suppose they ran out of grouse. From sheer boredom probably they began shooting each other. They were a shabby, quarrelsome crew. Perhaps I was young and impressionable then, but what surprised me was that with so much jumping in and out of each other’s beds they should all dislike each other so much. It seemed inconsistent.’

  Lord Delamore had assembled a party of rich or fashionable people. Kelby, who had published a life of Hitler that year, Tranmere, who had been in the news for killing natives in Malaya, an up-and-coming politician, an actor who was off to Hollywood. The Delamores knew how to compile a guest list. They had made up the number, after the lesser diplomat, the stockbroker and the motorcar tycoon, with a trio of models elegant in the year’s ‘New Look’.

  ‘Lord Delamore acted as a kind of ringmaster, organising the revels to create the maximum drama and embarrassment,’ said Harry. ‘After a week somebody shot him. It could have been any one of them, but finding out exactly who made solving Chinese puzzles look easy. They all lied about where they had been at two o’clock that morning, or who they had been with, and half of them were too drunk to remember. You should have seen what the newspapers made of it!’

  ‘Why did you arrest Sir Philip Tranmere?’ Paul asked.

  ‘I thought he’d done it. He hated Lord Delamore and he was Lady Delamore’s lover. But there was no evidence. He couldn’t remember whether he’d done it or not.’

  ‘Poor old Tranmere,’ Paul murmured.

  ‘I don�
�t mind a man who takes a drink occasionally,’ said Harry with an air of tolerance. ‘But I can’t stand a fellow who falls over.’

  ‘Do you know who did kill him?’ Paul asked.

  ‘No. It was one of those cases I was almost glad not to solve. There would have been even more lurid journalism at the trial. I was relieved to let the whole affair die down. There was more pressing work to do.’

  Paul spent the next few hours mugging up his post-war social history in the classical mausoleum of Kensington Central Library, going through back numbers of The Times and looking up what he could of the popular Sunday newspapers. It had been a grim period, and the public had clearly enjoyed the light relief which the scandal had provided. It had been the time of Forever Amber and The Outlaw, when lush escapism was needed.

  When Paul reached home at eight o’clock he found that Scott Reed was there waiting. And Steve had already scared him with her premonition of death.

  ‘Who’d want to kill me?’ he asked plaintively. ‘I’m only a simple publisher.’

  Kate Balfour had spent two days preparing l’Estouffat de Boeuf and she served it up with apologies that it was really a farmhouse dish, not quite suited to twentieth-century kitchens. It was soaked in wine and the sauce tasted like pure Armagnac. By the end of the meal even Scott Reed was relaxed. He was spearing pieces of Caerphilly without seeing his own stomach beneath the knife.

  He was even inclined to be metaphysical about death. ‘I’m not afraid,’ he said over the brandy. ‘I could do with the rest.’ He was nodding solemnly to himself as he changed his mind. ‘It’s a rather positive thing, though, rather irreversible. You can’t change your mind once you’ve been killed, can you?’ He lit a cigar and coughed. ‘I suppose you think I’m in danger because of the diary?’

  Steve explained that it had seemed like a probability. ‘But I expect Paul has it worked out.’

  ‘Who else has read the diary?’ Paul intervened, ‘apart from Kelby?’

  ‘Nobody. Apart from me. And Bella Spender. I doubt whether Kelby had time to read it, because he disappeared half an hour after I left the diary with him.’

  ‘Perhaps the killer couldn’t take a chance on that,’ said Paul.

  Scott Reed moved cautiously away from the window. ‘We’d better get to the bottom of this, hadn’t we?’

  Paul Temple agreed. ‘Who did the diary say killed Lord Tranmere?’

  ‘Some minor diplomatic type called Price-Pemberton. I’ve never heard of him. But the diary wouldn’t be evidence, would it? I mean, he wouldn’t need to worry about being convicted.’

  ‘No,’ Paul said with a laugh, ‘but I doubt whether you would persuade him to sign your release. He might even sue you.’

  He went to the Who’s Who on his bookshelves, but Price-Pemberton was not entered. He wasn’t in the London telephone directory either.

  ‘Do you think,’ Steve asked him, ‘that Price-Pemberton will be jumping out of the windows of his club?’

  ‘It’s an idea,’ said Paul.

  He telephoned Lady Delamore. It was a difficult conversation, because she claimed not to know Price-Pemberton and then, having remembered, affected not to have kept in touch. ‘Little Willy was rather tiresome,’ she shrilled down the telephone. ‘Always wanted women older than himself. I was very relieved when he gave up the diplomatic service and dropped out of my own life. That was when I invented the phrase: ‘Dead, dead, and never called me mother’. He would never have made an ambassador.’

  ‘Is he dead then?’ Paul asked.

  ‘No. It’s a quotation from East Lynne. Not my favourite book. Willy retired and went to live on the Thames, somewhere near Marlow. But of course he might have drowned in the last twenty-five years.’

  Paul agreed and hung up feeling not much wiser.

  ‘Scott,’ he said wearily, ‘I suppose you’ll go through with the business of asking everybody named in the diary to sign a release?’

  ‘Is it worth doing now?’

  ‘I don’t know. You might get some interesting reactions.’ He poured himself another brandy. ‘I suppose you hadn’t got round to approaching Sir Philip Tranmere?’

  Scott leaned forward in the egg-shaped chair. ‘It’s funny you should ask that, because I bumped into him the night before last. I met him at my club, just by chance, and he said he would sign. He didn’t seem very interested.’

  ‘How funny,’ Paul murmured. ‘Perhaps after all you had better not approach any of the others.’

  ‘I’ve no idea where to find most of them. A lot of debutantes and models who are probably living in Australia, and of course some of them have died quite naturally. I was going to put an ad in the personal column of The Times. And then there are some policemen…’

  ‘Policemen never commit suicide,’ Steve pronounced.

  Paul walked thoughtfully to the window and stared across the Thames. ‘Speaking of debutantes,’ he said, ‘who was that girl I used to see with Kelby? She was an attractive young thing.’

  ‘Oh, Jennie. She was his girlfriend.’

  ‘Jennie?’ Paul opened a window to clear his mind of tobacco smoke and brandy. ‘Tell me more. What did she do?’

  ‘She took off all her clothes at a party I gave to launch Kelby’s history of the Spanish civil war. It was nearly midnight, but my wife was still there and she was appalled. Kelby didn’t seem to notice. He was arguing with one of those left-wing poets. She had a beautiful figure.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps she married a nice young man and settled down. Although I pity the nice young man.’

  It might have been his imagination, or else Paul had seen a shadow move down in the mews doorway opposite. It looked like a man standing back in the darkest corner.

  ‘My goodness,’ said Scott as the sound of the church clock on the other side of Battersea Park came clearly across the water. It was striking eleven. ‘Is that the time? My wife will think I’ve been killed.’ The inappositeness of his little joke suddenly occurred to him and he giggled unhappily. ‘You know what my wife is like.’

  ‘Hang on a moment,’ said Paul.

  He went through to the kitchen where Kate was finishing the washing up. Paul told her that he and Steve would attend to that.

  It was ten minutes past eleven when Scott Reed left the house. Paul watched him from the upstairs window. Scott climbed into his Rover 2000 and while the car door was open the interior light clearly showed a man sitting in the passenger seat. He appeared to say something, and then the car drove off towards the Albert Bridge.

  Chapter 7

  KATE BALFOUR was not the most efficient housekeeper in the world. She tried hard, and some of her cooking was out of this century. But she often found better things to do with her time than housework, and her treatment of Paul’s visitors was occasionally deplorable. Only the previous month she had thrown a guest down the stairs and broken three of his ribs. The police force had never been a very good training ground for domestic service.

  She followed Scott Reed out of London and on to the Portsmouth Road in Paul’s Jaguar. Scott Reed lived in Hambledon, just the other side of Godalming, and if the mystery passenger was going all the way with him then she didn’t have much to worry about; until she reached Hambledon. She cruised down at seventy miles an hour, about twenty-five seconds behind the Rover. She calculated that if they stopped in front of her she would know it soon enough.

  Her initial reaction had been to curse Scott Reed for not living in Islington like every other publisher. Hambledon after all was a two-hour drive into Surrey! But once past Surbiton her stout policewoman’s heart was gradually uplifted by the countryside. The silver birches looked elegantly sparse in the full moonlight. The huge cliffs of sandstone that frequently towered on either side of the road were deceptively majestic.

  From time to time on the deserted road she glimpsed the Rover ahead; its tail lights blinked whenever Scott Reed braked and sometimes she saw the car and its two
passengers silhouetted on the crest of a hill. Going down the steep slope that was Guildford she nearly ran into the back of them. They seemed to be chatting amiably.

  A few minutes later Kate was manoeuvring the narrow, ancient streets of Godalming and she felt again the tranquil atmosphere of the early nineteenth century. That was when she lost the car in front.

  She increased speed, hoping to reach Scott Reed’s house before disaster befell him. And to hell with discreet tailing! She hit eighty through the rural wastes of Witley and then slowed down at the top of the hill: Scott Reed lived somewhere over to the left. She glanced at an impressive building on her right – a charity board school of some kind that didn’t know its place. And then the turning on the left just by the pig farm. Kate did a racing driver’s turn, alongside Hambledon Common and round to the stockbrokers’ Tudor residence of Scott Reed.

  Scott Reed and the mystery man were just letting themselves into the house.

  Kate left the Jaguar on the other side of the green and walked back to the house. She noted approvingly that the high walls and massive gates were a sufficient deterrent to casual crime. But determined burglars or ex-policewomen can manage these things. She shinned over the wall with an agility that rendered her fifteen stone ridiculous and crept up to the windows.

  She saw Scott Reed in his living room pouring drinks from his cupboard for the stranger. It was impossible to hear what they were saying, but they appeared to be on friendly terms. She noted the stranger’s appearance: medium build, five feet eight, dark hair and swarthy complexion, aged forty to fifty, no distinguishing features. A crook.

  Kate had noticed a telephone booth two hundred yards back along the road, outside a general store-cum-post office. She slipped away to make a call.

  ‘That was Kate,’ said Paul as he tossed his silk dressing gown onto the bed. ‘She’s down in Hambledon.’

  Steve grunted.

  ‘The mystery visitor is down there with Scott, drinking and chatting like an old friend.’