Paul Temple and the Kelby Affair

by Francis Durbridge

  ‘Well, Temple,’ said Charlie Vosper, ‘did you find the missing diary?’

  ‘No, although I discovered who stole it,’ said Paul. ‘I’m beginning to agree with you. It has no bearing on the case.’ He flinched as the inspector slammed his car door. ‘You haven’t made any arrests yet?’

  ‘I want to know about that diary. If you hold anything back from me—’

  ‘Charlie,’ Paul laughed, ‘you’ve had a change of heart! I thought you told me the diary was irrelevant?’

  ‘‘That was before I was summoned to the assistant commissioner’s office. I’ve been warned off, Temple, told to lay off the official history side.’ Vosper forced his craggy features into an unconvincing smile. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever been thankful to have you around on a case, Paul. It means you can tell me what I’m not allowed to know.’

  ‘But there’s nothing—’

  ‘When my assistant commissioner tells me to mind my own business, I know there’s something going on that’s very much my business. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.’ He glanced at his watch and then at the pub across from the war memorial. ‘I’ll see you in that pub at seven o’clock.’

  Vosper climbed quickly into the car beside Jennie and waved to the driver.

  ‘Wait a minute. Charlie! What was the autopsy report on Kelby?’

  The inspector wound down his window. ‘Kelby was strangled, died of a broken neck. There wasn’t a drop of water in his lungs.’ The car swung round and headed rapidly towards London.

  Paul waited by his Jaguar as Leo and Gladys Ashwood came from the churchyard, and as they passed he offered them a lift. ‘It’s a bleak day to walk all that way,’ he said kindly. Gladys accepted.

  ‘It was a nice service,’ she said contentedly. ‘It was nice to see all those friends of Mr Kelby turn out.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better,’ said Paul.

  ‘I like funerals,’ she explained. ‘They make it seem somehow all right. Not that we aren’t upset any more, but a funeral is something you can come to grips with.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  Leo had said not a word, and in the driving mirror Paul saw him smile slightly at his wife’s efforts to put her feelings into words.

  ‘Who was the dramatic-looking blonde?’ Paul asked. ‘Everyone seemed to know her.’

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Leo.

  ‘She smiled at you as she left. The girl I was talking to. She just drove off with Inspector Vosper.’

  Leo grunted. ‘She used to live in the area, but she’s left now.’

  They drove on in silence.

  ‘We’re not having a farewell party,’ Gladys Ashwood explained as they reached the house. ‘It wouldn’t be right, not after the way he died. With his murderer still not caught. But please come in, Mr Temple. I’ll be making some tea in a moment. Miss Leonard and Master Ronnie will be in the living room somewhere.’

  ‘That’s very kind.’

  Paul went through the kitchen and into the hall. He found them in the library. Tracy Leonard was half-heartedly collecting up some papers from various corners of the room and putting them in order. Ronnie was helplessly watching her. There was nothing to do, but Tracy was trying in a desultory way to keep herself occupied. Paul noticed that on closer inspection she was looking drawn. The death and the sleeping pills were combining to make her haggard.

  ‘Sure, come in,’ said Ronnie. ‘I saw you arrive.’

  ‘I know this is not the time to intrude—’

  Ronnie broke in impatiently. ‘That’s all right. Anything that will help to solve this damned mystery.’

  ‘Even,’ Tracy murmured ironically, ‘you, Mr Temple.’

  The two of them were functioning as a team now, the hostility Paul had sensed earlier was gone. It was the effect of adversity shared, Paul assumed, like a population at war. Ronnie could recognise a woman to lean on when he saw one.

  Paul smiled at her irony. ‘I’d like to help, but I know even less about the case than Inspector Vosper does, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’ Miss Leonard adopted the tone she used on the unfortunate policeman. ‘He’s been padding about here all the week asking fatuous questions about our movements and getting nowhere. The man’s a fool. Obviously our movements don’t help in the slightest. We didn’t know there was going to be a murder, so none of us has an alibi. We didn’t know it would be necessary to have one.’

  ‘Poor old Charlie Vosper,’ Paul said gently. ‘He has to fill in the details. It helps to know, for instance, that Mr Kelby left for a meeting in the village at eleven thirty. Then he had an appointment for half past four with Ted Mortimer, which apparently he never kept. We know where he was at half past four. But he also had an assignment with a woman for ten o’clock that night, and we’ve no idea whether he kept that assignment.’

  ‘What woman was this?’ Ronnie asked in astonishment.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tracy Leonard had turned sickly pale. ‘Do you know who it might have been, Miss Leonard?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid— no. It must be a mistake.’ She was thrown off balance.

  ‘Who could it have been, Miss Leonard?’

  ‘Why should I know? I’m his secretary. Mr Kelby’s personal habits were no concern of mine. If he made assignments, as you call them, they would be his private affair.’

  ‘Did he have a mistress, Miss Leonard, either now or in the past five years?’

  ‘Probably.’ She glared at him. ‘Even the most brilliant men have their feet of clay. But they don’t usually ask their secretaries to make the arrangements!’

  Paul smiled understandingly. ‘It helps to know what Kelby was doing that day. And obviously it helps to know what other people were doing at the same time. What were you doing, for instance, Ronnie?’

  ‘Me?’ He was surprised by the question. ‘I don’t know. I’ve already told you and the inspector. I just messed about. I was late getting up.’ He shrugged nervously. ‘I took things easy. After lunch I went down to the club and had a game of golf.’

  ‘And in the evening?’

  ‘Well, most of the evening Tracy and I were driving around trying to find out what had happened to my father. About ten o’clock we decided we were getting nowhere so we went over to the police station.’

  Paul nodded encouragingly. ‘Was that before or after the phone call?’

  ‘Phone call?’ He was startled, and he glanced in alarm towards Tracy. ‘I don’t know. What phone call?’

  ‘Didn’t someone telephone on Monday evening?’

  ‘No, I’ve already told you. No one telephoned me. Tracy and I were together the whole evening! If I’d received a phone call she would have known about it.’

  Paul looked enquiringly at Tracy Leonard. She shook her head in confirmation.

  ‘We were together all evening.’ She took the tray of tea and buttered crumpets from Gladys Ashwood and began serving. ‘Wouldn’t it be more sensible to assume that Mr Kelby was murdered by someone who wished to get his hands on that diary, Mr Temple?’

  ‘It would be more simple,’ Paul agreed. ‘It would clear you and Ronnie and everyone else here of suspicion. It would be more convenient for you.’

  She smiled. ‘You speak as if that were reprehensible. But for myself I would like to be cleared of suspicion.’

  Paul agreed good-humouredly that everyone hoped she would be. He was beginning to understand why Charlie Vosper was a misanthrope. He tried to direct the questions back to Ronnie Kelby. He nibbled some buttered toast and said conversationally that he too had just come back from the United States. Such an exciting country, such friendly people.

  ‘I hated America.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘It frightened me. All those riots and muggings and armed policemen; you can’t walk down the streets in New York. It’s a violent place. Nobody is safe there.’

  Paul raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s my guess your father would
rather be in Philadelphia, as W. C. Fields put it.’ But it sounded as if he were moralising, or selling the idea of foreign travel. ‘Did you make your fortune these last ten years?’ he asked wearily.

  ‘No. The Carnegies and the Fords and the Kennedys got there ahead of me. I’m broke, Mr Temple. Another reason why I had half decided to stay in England. It’s an easier place to be poor in. My father was trying to find me a job before he was—’ He hesitated superstitiously. ‘Before he was strangled.’

  ‘You knew that?’ Paul asked. He took another crumpet from Gladys Ashwood’s freshly toasted batch and smiled his thanks at her.

  ‘That he died of a broken neck? Yes, the inspector told me yesterday.’

  ‘Of course, he would have done. You are the next of kin. He only told me this afternoon. But I’d like to know what your reaction was. I thought it was very interesting.’

  ‘What’s interesting about it?’ Ronnie demanded. ‘My father is dead. Does it matter, except to my father, whether he was strangled or drowned? This isn’t a bloody crossword puzzle!’

  Before Paul could make soothing noises the young man had turned away in distress and Tracy Leonard was being all maternal. He wasn’t in tears, but he was tense and struggling for self-control. The sound of weeping was coming from Gladys Ashwood.

  ‘This is hardly fair, Mr Temple,’ Tracy Leonard said coldly. ‘Ronnie was only just on the point of making things up with his father when Mr Kelby died. That leaves an awful lot of free-floating guilt to be carefully handled. There’s no real need to play on his feelings of responsibility. And look what you’ve done to poor Gladys!’

  Gladys was stumbling towards the door mumbling: ‘It isn’t so, it isn’t true.’ Her crying could be heard all the way down the passage and into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Ronnie. ‘I suppose he has to break through the facade if he’s going to find the killer. And it is interesting, he’s perfectly right. Why did Gladys react like that?’

  Tracy shrugged as she went to find out.

  ‘You’ll need to be clever,’ Ronnie added, ‘to penetrate Tracy Leonard’s facade. I’ve been trying to get through for nearly a month.’

  Paul felt slightly immoral, like a big game hunter, as he followed to do just that. He found Tracy Leonard in the passage outside the kitchen. ‘Is Gladys all right?’ he asked her.

  Tracy nodded.

  ‘The trouble with murder investigations is that all the humdrum secrets we usually live with are singled out for examination. Even the nicest man, by the time his idiosyncrasies have been isolated, can seem to be an alcoholic or an egomaniac, a womaniser or a miser. I’d like you to know how much I admired Alfred Kelby.’

  Her large brown eyes were sad as she smiled. ‘I didn’t admire him, Mr Temple. I was in love with him, as you obviously know, but I despised him. There are no humdrum secrets between a man and his secretary.’

  ‘Was he in love with you?’

  ‘No.’

  She led the way through to her quarters in the east wing of the house. It was a single, open-plan room with everything that a large flat would have contained in its split levels and partition cupboards. It had been designed for Tracy Leonard. Paul stood in the doorway for several moments and admired it as a piece of design.

  Tracy suddenly fitted in, the tall slender body in flowing black, her lines evoked in movement against the pine walls. It was inevitable suddenly to see the bed on its raised platform, with dressing table and wardrobe, as a shrine facing east in the girl’s sanctuary. The total effect was surprisingly feminine and warm.

  ‘I think he loved me once, during the summer I first came here. It was the weather for romance. But then he lost interest, he found someone else. I became just another figure from his past, and a man of that age has a lot of past. I meant almost nothing to Alfred these last four years.’

  Paul was staring at a charcoal figure drawing which had been framed and hung on the wall beside a desk. It was Tracy, lying across a divan in sleep. ‘He must have been mad,’ Paul murmured.

  She grinned. ‘Thanks.’ The wide mouth was open and amused.

  ‘Why did you stay here?’

  ‘I like my flat, and I enjoyed my work. I had the excuse not to face the real problems of being a historian while I was here. Now I shall have to do original work, and I may find I have no originality. That’s a discovery I preferred to put off as long as possible.’

  Paul sat in a chair that looked like a Le Corbusier copy in tubular steel. ‘I would have thought that working with Kelby was good for the originality.’ It was a pretty solid chair, better for looking at than sitting in.

  ‘Alfred was fundamentally frivolous, Mr Temple. He had a brilliant mind and he liked to show off with it. He spent too much time appearing on television. Perhaps he was too intelligent to take history seriously. The only thing that history proves is that men are superficial and that turning points are fortuitous, the men in power are not the men in control. So Alfred began to see himself as a natural genius, far more clever than Hitler or Napoleon or Cromwell or Henry VII. The irony is that he probably was more clever than they, but he proved it by earning money, cracking jokes and sleeping with attractive young girls. He didn’t know what else to do. Any other form of power would have seemed to him unsophisticated.’

  He was also too kind for other forms of power, Paul thought. He wondered about the reason for her love, why she had needed a man old enough to be her father. Kelby had been gentle in a world of ebullient students, and Tracy for all her physical perfection had been an unworldly girl.

  Paul sighed. He was romanticising about her. For all he knew she was a savage and wild animal motivated by her sexual drives. But it didn’t matter. He was content to relax for a few minutes in her company.

  Tracy went abstractedly up the brief flight of steps and sat down on the bed. She looked down at Paul.

  ‘Who was the girl,’ Paul asked, ‘at the funeral today?’

  ‘That was Jennie Mortimer. She’s younger than I am, which counts with a man like Alfred.’

  ‘Jennie Mortimer?’

  ‘That’s right, Ted Mortimer’s daughter. She’s a nymphet who learned how to make men dance at a very early age.’ Tracy laughed maliciously. ‘Do you know, she’s at a teachers’ training college? Alfred had to give her special coaching to get her through her A levels. Her brain isn’t where she scores.’

  As she spoke with such brutal cynicism a tear ran down her cheek. Paul found the sight quite strangely desolating.

  Chapter 9

  THE Crown was one of those pubs that had been licensed in the thirteenth century for the accommodation of pilgrims, and it hadn’t changed much. The low beams were the kind you bang your head on after ten o’clock and the ‘parlour’ was built to resemble a parlour; there was no recognisable bar and the customers had to sit round facing each other and talk. Paul went into the public bar.

  He ordered a whisky. ‘You’re quiet here this evening,’ he said to the barman.

  ‘We don’t fill up till after eight o’clock,’ said the barman.

  It was a few minutes past seven. ‘I suppose all the farmers stay indoors and listen to The Archers?’

  The barman was baffled. He was a stout, benevolent man in his late fifties. He tried to be friendly. ‘You’ll be down from London, I suppose. For the funeral this afternoon.’

  ‘That’s right. Poor old Kelby. I suppose he was well known in the village?’

  ‘Ar.’ He polished a few glasses while he considered. ‘Mr Kelby did a lot for Melford Cross. On the education. And of course he were famous – he used to come in here with people we see on the television.’ The barman turned out to be talkative. ‘Not that he were stuck up. He came in here sometimes with old Leo Ashwood and had a pint. Mr Kelby was well liked.’

  Paul bought the man a drink and gradually turned the conversation to public opinion in the village. Do local people think they know how it happened? Local gossip can be a lot better informed th
an the police.

  ‘You mean, who do they think drowned him in the rain butt?’ the landlord asked incredulously. ‘Well, everybody knows who done it, don’t they?’

  ‘The police haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘Ar, yes, well, they’re CID from London, aren’t they? What would they know about Melford Cross? But the people here know who did it. You ask Inspector Hobden.’ He nodded darkly. ‘We knowed as soon as Mr Kelby went missing.’

  ‘Inspector Hobden couldn’t even tell me the name of Kelby’s girlfriend.’

  The barman smiled cryptically and said that Hobden had to live with the people of Melford Cross.

  ‘How do they know who done it?’ Paul asked.

  ‘A man – a farmer who don’t like his animals, Mr Temple, he’s a wrong ’un. He’d be capable of killing a man, especially if he had a motive, like money. And that’s all Ted Mortimer cares about: money!’

  ‘And his daughter?’ Paul asked.

  The barman grinned.

  Paul bought another whisky and returned to the end of the bar. It was half past seven. Half a dozen local youths had come into the bar and were settling down for a social evening. Paul noted with surprise that the courting couples retained an eighteenth-century mode of behaviour. They arrived in pairs, but then the girls all sat together with their drinks and gossiped about the boys, while the boys all stood together at the bar with their pints and talked cars. Courtship would still be a protracted business in Melford.

  Surely, he thought, Ted Mortimer couldn’t have murdered Kelby for money, because he would still owe the two thousand pounds to Kelby’s estate. If it were Mortimer it would need to be for a different motive. Paul wondered how Kelby came to lend the man two thousand pounds. Something to do with the girl? It was a lot of money for a neighbourly gesture.

  His reverie was dispelled by the sight of Leo Ashwood. The chauffeur–handyman came into the bar and ordered a double rum. The barman treated him as a regular, but he was not over-familiar. Leo was obviously well known as a strong silent type. He stood and drank his rum with grim introspection. He hadn’t noticed Paul in the corner.