Paul Temple and the Kelby Affair

by Francis Durbridge

  She went to a delicate little escritoire in the corner of the room and took out a small packet. ‘Poor little Willie,’ she sighed, ‘and poor Rover. They were such fun that summer.’ She smiled sadly at Paul and gave him the packet. ‘This is for you.’ It contained a diary, octavo sized and bound in calf.

  ‘Is this it?’ Paul asked in surprise.

  There was a jangling sound from the direction of the window. It was like a gentle breeze through a scarecrow. Lady Delamore sniffed and looked about suspiciously.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Harry. ‘You can give it to your friend Scott Reed. Tell him he can go ahead and publish it now.’

  Paul was flicking through the green ink pages when Lady Delamore asked him whether he used Adagio perfume. He sighed and assured her he never used scent and bathed daily. No hair oil and he shaved with broken beer bottles.

  ‘Then we must have a burglar.’

  She prodded savagely into the curtains behind her.

  ‘Ouch!’

  Lady Delamore pulled the sash which drew the curtains back in a dramatic clatter of steel rollers. Paul and Harry rose simultaneously to their feet prepared for battle. But then they relaxed. Huddled in a corner was a slim black burglar which uncoiled bashfully into Steve Temple. She blinked at them and tried to grin.

  ‘Why, Mrs Temple, how unexpected. You must have arrived a few minutes before your husband. I thought I heard beads jangling in the hall. I suppose you came up through the basement.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I do hope you didn’t wake up Simpson as you passed his quarters,’ Lady Delamore said severely. ‘He gets very frightened of burglars and is quite liable to give in his notice tomorrow.’

  ‘No,’ Steve murmured, ‘I was very quiet.’ She turned angrily on her husband. ‘What are you laughing at, you big ape?’

  ‘There’s a piece of your face flaking off.’

  Steve was saying something enigmatic about seeing Jeremy instead when Paul interrupted with the formal introductions.

  ‘Harry, you remember my wife, Steve.’

  Harry nodded. ‘I could never forget those flashing green eyes.’

  They led Steve from the house complaining bitterly about orgies and improbably long funeral ceremonies. She must, Paul concluded, have been at the slimming pills again.

  Chapter 12

  ‘HARRY said publish and be damned,’ Paul repeated wearily. ‘A perfectly harmless little man committed suicide last night, so the diary can do nobody any harm.’

  Paul had been trying to work. It had been a spare hour to use constructively before Scott Reed arrived to collect the diary. Paul had been sitting at the massive desk with his hands over his ears, staring at the typewriter. It was the kind of desk which Dickens had worked at, words tumbling off his pen, characters like Quilp and Sykes and Magwitch seething through his imagination. Paul’s mind was a total vacuum. Even with his hands over his ears the only thing he was aware of was the stereophonic din of guitars and drums, a piercing blues voice lamenting the fate of a hell’s angel.

  ‘Couldn’t we turn that down a little?’ he asked mildly.

  She didn’t answer. She hadn’t heard. She was sitting with her sketch pad in the Swedish silence chair. Paul turned off the record player and returned to his desk.

  ‘Paul! I need that music. My sleeve copy has to be delivered ready for the printer on Monday. I need to play the record until it has worked on my unconscious and suggested its own design.’

  ‘You can’t hear it in that chair.’ He beat a quick pattern with his fingers on the fibreglass shell. ‘It suggests to my very battered conscious mind all hell let loose.’

  ‘Very witty. Darling, you aren’t turned on. This is a group that is really underground, what they call a group’s group.’

  ‘Why not a cover of the group in an underground tunnel with a tube train thundering up behind them?’

  Steve waited patiently for him to finish laughing. ‘Jeremy is convinced this will top the LP charts.’

  ‘I never was very impressed by Jeremy’s taste. He has such an eye for the obvious.’ He stopped and then pointed a finger at Steve. ‘Which reminds me, Mrs Temple. What did you mean last night by wishing you’d gone to see Jeremy instead?’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she murmured. ‘So you think I’m obvious, do you?’

  ‘You can be pretty direct.’ He laughed. ‘Did you hear about Jeremy and that girl who designed book jackets for him? He asked her to stay the night and she stayed. The police were called at three o’clock in the morning to rescue him. He’d fled naked into the street and was cowering in a telephone box.’

  ‘Liar. Why don’t you do some work on your book?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll make Jeremy the victim, killed in the first chapter. That would teach him a lesson. Slaughtered in a telephone box. People will think he went into the phone box to use his antiperspirant spray. And it was actually a liquid sulphuric acid spray. That’s what can happen to people who undress in telephone boxes.’

  ‘As long as you don’t make me the villain,’ said Steve.

  ‘You’d make a good villain.’ Paul laughed, his good humour restored. ‘Let’s get rid of Scott as quickly as we can. We should eat out tonight, go to a theatre perhaps. Let’s go somewhere luxurious, so that I can remind you what good company I am.’

  She poked out her tongue. ‘I have a design to finish.’

  ‘Remind me to punch Jeremy on the nose next time I see him.’

  Paul put the needle back on the record. He tried to convince himself that the music was relevant to his theme of gratuitous violence. He decided that a novel on the subject would be gratuitous.

  ‘You’d have to compose yourself to die,’ Paul murmured, ‘whether you’re hanged near Hindhead or drowned near Marlow. Little Willie was the type who’d be afraid of pain and he’d hate the cold. I suppose he was brave. And at least his death had intentionality.’

  ‘Yes, dear.’ Steve was dabbing the three sample colours on three different tracings of her design. ‘Last stage coming up.’

  ‘I suppose Kelby must have been pretty scared as well.’

  ‘Poor Kelby.’ Steve put her arms round Paul’s neck from behind. ‘Do you know who murdered him?’

  ‘Yes, probably. But God knows what we can do about it. The key to the whole case is Grover—’

  The front doorbell rang.

  ‘That must be Scott,’ Steve said. ‘It’s all right, darling, I’ll let him in.’

  Paul unlocked the drawer and took out the diary, experiencing a moment of dread in case it wasn’t there. But there it was. A troublesome and unnecessary document.

  ‘Mr Temple?’ a woman’s voice was asking in the hall downstairs.

  ‘What is it?’ Steve asked in bewilderment. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Tell your husband—’

  Paul hurried out to the landing and saw Gladys Ashwood slumped against the door, her arms outstretched, her face clenched in horror. Paul ran down the stairs four at a time.

  ‘What’s happened, Gladys?’ he called.

  She tried to raise her head to look at him. ‘He knew,’ she gasped. ‘About being strangled…in the car.’ Her eyes closed and she collapsed onto Steve. The dead weight sent Steve reeling back against the stairs and they both fell to the floor in a heap. Gladys Ashwood’s body was stretched across Steve’s. Paul could see the knife between her shoulder blades.

  ‘Paul!’ Steve shouted. ‘Paul! Where are you going?’

  Paul ran out into the mews. It was almost dark now and the fog had made visibility worse. He could just make out the tail lights of a taxi turning into Chester Square. And there was somebody coming across the street. A man with light footsteps. The stranger in the mews turned out to be Scott Reed.

  ‘Steve, call a doctor,’ Paul shouted. ‘And after that ring Charlie Vosper.’

  ‘Help me up!’ she replied.

  Scott Reed was breathless and dishevelled. His clothes were dusty and there was a cut over his fore
head. He didn’t speak when Paul took his arm and led him upstairs. He stared numbly at Mrs Ashwood’s body draped over Steve, but he didn’t say anything.

  ‘Careful how you move her, Steve, and don’t touch the knife.’

  Gladys Ashwood was dead. It took about an hour for the murder squad to go through the same routine as Paul had watched on Thursday. Photographs and fingerprints, preliminary details of time and place, taking away the body. Meanwhile Steve was bathing Scott’s forehead and making soothing noises. It was all becoming, Paul reflected, repetitious. He wasn’t surprised that Charlie Vosper arrived on the scene in a mood of blustering irritability.

  Steve made things worse by asking him after Sir Graham.

  ‘As far as I know he’s very fit, Mrs Temple,’ snapped Vosper. ‘We don’t see a great deal of the commissioner, and then not to ask after his health.’

  Paul had to turn away while he controlled his grin. He wondered whether Steve had done it deliberately.

  ‘How are you feeling now, Mrs Temple?’

  ‘I’ve just had a very large drink, inspector. I feel a lot better.’

  Vosper leaned over and examined Scott Reed’s forehead. The publisher was trying to stand, but he was in obvious pain and he sank back into the chair. Vosper clucked unsympathetically and then consulted a sergeant’s notebook.

  ‘Mrs Temple,’ he said in puzzlement, ‘are you quite sure Mrs Ashwood said: “He knew about being strangled in the car”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that all she said?’

  ‘Well, yes. Then she collapsed with a knife in her back.’

  ‘He knew about being strangled in the car,’ the inspector repeated to himself. ‘I wonder what she meant by that.’

  It seemed to Paul a pretty unanswerable question, so he went to the cocktail cabinet and replenished people’s glasses. ‘How about you, Charlie, would you like a drink?’

  ‘I’ll have a whisky when this sergeant has left the room,’ said Vosper. ‘I’m on duty. I don’t see what was so important about her message that she came all this way to London, or that someone had to kill her to stop her going into detail.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ Scott Reed piped surprisingly from his chair in the window, ‘she was probably trying to say something about poor old Alfred.’

  Vosper swung on him. ‘What makes you think that, sir?’

  ‘Well, I mean, wasn’t Kelby strangled before he was put in the rain butt?’

  ‘Yes, he was. I know that, sir, and the police doctor, even the coroner now, we all know that. But how do you know it, sir? We simply told the press he’d been found in a rain butt at Galloway Farm.’

  Scott was visibly flustered. ‘It was in the paper. I read somewhere that Kelby was strangled before he was put in the vat.’ He looked helplessly across at Paul. ‘Wasn’t he strangled?’

  ‘The full story was in the evening papers yesterday, Charlie, every detail.’ The sergeant had gone so Paul gave Charlie Vosper his whisky. ‘They don’t only print what you tell them, I’m afraid.’

  Charlie held up his glass in salute and muttered something about Ted Mortimer blabbing to the whole world. ‘Some people never learn to keep their mouths shut,’ he said to Scott. ‘But anyway, let’s hear your version of what happened tonight, sir. I’ve heard Mrs Temple’s story.’

  Scott was hazy about what had happened. ‘I was walking towards the mews when a taxi drove past me. I recognised the occupant; it was Gladys Ashwood. When I arrived at the mews she’d already got out of the taxi. Then I heard the sounds of a scuffle and the next thing I knew someone was running towards me. He was running towards the entrance, and he obviously didn’t see me because—’

  ‘How do you know he didn’t see you, sir?’

  ‘It was very dark, well, nearly dark but quite foggy. Anyway he ran headlong into me. He would hardly have run into me if he’d seen me, would he, inspector?’

  Vosper refused to be drawn. ‘Go on, sir.’

  ‘He knocked me over. And as I was falling I made a grab for his legs. Not to attack him really, more an instinctive grab to support myself. And you know what happened? He kicked out and hit me in the face. I was lucky I wasn’t blinded.’

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ said Charlie Vosper. ‘Tell me what he looked like.’

  ‘Eh? Well, it was dark, and foggy.’

  ‘Would you recognise him again if you saw him?’

  Scott shook his head unhappily. Even that made him wince with pain. ‘No. The only thing I can tell you about him was that he—he was about my height and a great deal heavier. Well built, I would say. But I certainly wouldn’t recognise him again.’

  The inspector had been questioning Scott as if he thought him a murderer. To Paul’s relief he quickly changed his manner. He sat beside Scott Reed and sighed. ‘Do you think the man was already in the mews? Waiting for Mrs Ashwood when the taxi arrived?’

  ‘Yes, I think he must have been,’ said Scott. He was so grateful for the new friendly Vosper that he went into detail. ‘It’s my bet he was standing in the shadows near the opposite garage.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie Vosper agreed, ‘that seems very likely. Very likely indeed. Thank you, Mr Reed. By the way, one of my men picked up a shoe out there. Quite a nice brogue slip-on shoe.’ The inspector produced the shoe with all the panache of a conjuror. ‘What do you think of this, Mr Reed?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Scott took the shoe and examined it. ‘I suppose I might have pulled it off his foot when the brute was kicking me, or when I fell and grabbed him.’

  Paul asked to see the shoe. It was a size nine, he found, and handmade. ‘Colson’s of Bond Street,’ he murmured. ‘Our friend has very expensive tastes.’

  ‘Colson’s?’ Scott asked in surprise.

  ‘Yes. Of Bond Street.’

  The inspector was staring at Scott. ‘What were you going to say, sir?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Scott was wriggling again in discomfort.

  ‘You must have been going to say something,’ the inspector persisted.

  Paul intervened. ‘It looks as if Scott buys his shoes from Colson’s. They’re very nice shoes. Is that what you were going to say, Scott?’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘But I’m not the only one. Lots of my friends buy their shoes from Colson’s.’

  Paul looked across at Steve and smiled sadly. The jigsaw puzzle was complete in his mind, but there was not a scrap of indictable evidence. Demonstrating the guilt of the murderer would be difficult, and highly dangerous.

  ‘Charlie,’ he said, pouring the inspector another drink without asking, ‘I want to talk to you.’

  The regiment of law and forensic workers were departing. Vosper sat grimly on the sofa next to the publisher.

  ‘Policemen buy their shoes from Freeman Hardy & Willis,’ he muttered.

  Scott Reed sprang to his feet. ‘I really must be going. My wife— forty odd miles to Hambledon.’ Before Steve could offer him a bite to eat he fled into the mews clutching his valuable package.

  ‘A very nervous man,’ said Charlie Vosper. He looked balefully across the room at Paul and sighed. ‘Well, what do you want to talk to me about?’

  ‘Do you know who murdered Kelby?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were you and that bloody boss of mine. You’re a right couple of cowboys.’

  ‘Don’t be petulant, Charlie.’

  ‘Petulant? Poor little Willie Price-Pemberton is dead!’

  Paul nodded. ‘I read about it.’

  ‘How can I run an efficient detective squad when my boss regards whole areas of a case as his private business? I told the assistant commissioner this morning, I don’t give a damn who murdered Kelby!’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He told me not to be petulant.’

  ‘Quite right, Charlie. You care deeply who killed him, and so do I. As for killing Gladys Ashwood, I feel really vindictive about that. She was a nice old woman and she was trying to help us.’

&nb
sp; ‘I know.’ Charlie Vosper finished his drink in silence. ‘All right,’ he said when he had composed himself. ‘I become angry when people from above interfere with my work.’ He smiled tentatively. ‘Did you see the evening paper tonight? That made me angry as well.’

  ‘What was in the paper?’

  Charlie took the folded up evening paper from his raincoat and tossed it across to Paul. There was a photograph of a very photogenic Jennie Mortimer with her skirt up to her thighs kneeing Leo Ashwood in the groin. The Oxfordshire reporter had been given his own byline in the London newspaper: ‘Student Teacher Had Secret Tryst with Murdered Historian’. By Jack Armitage. It was a long story and by most standards well written. It described how Jennie Mortimer had had a date to meet Kelby at ten o’clock to discuss her father’s debt.

  ‘At ten o’clock last Monday night Alfred Kelby was dead. The police were called to the home of his ex-mistress last night to sort out a brawl which developed between…’

  Paul looked up in horror. ‘This story will get Jennie Mortimer murdered.’

  ‘Well,’ said Charlie, ‘I know it isn’t accurate reporting, and I told that bugger Armitage I’d have him for contempt of court, but—’

  ‘Her life is in danger!’ Paul threw the newspaper back at him. ‘Don’t you realise what this says? That at roughly the time Alfred Kelby was murdered he was supposed to be meeting Jennie in the field behind his house! So Jennie would have been at the most two hundred yards away. She could have seen the murder, and she would certainly have seen the murderer pass by on his way to dump the body on Mortimer’s farm.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘But nothing! Don’t you know why Gladys Ashwood was killed tonight? Don’t interrupt while I’m thinking aloud! She was killed because our murderer is on the run. She was on to him, and now he’ll think Jennie is on to him. He’s desperate, Charlie, he’ll kill again with no compunction whatever.’

  Vosper was bewildered. ‘Do you think Jennie Mortimer saw it happen?’

  ‘Maybe not, but if our murderer is to cover his tracks he’ll have to get rid of her just in case.’

  ‘Blast that fellow Armitage!’ Vosper stood up in dismay. ‘Look here, Temple. Do you know who this killer is?’