Paul Temple and the Kelby Affair

by Francis Durbridge

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘So, what’s the next move?’ Charlie Vosper didn’t often say things like that. He was a worried man. ‘Come on, you tell me for a change. What do we do?’

  ‘We must look after Jennie Mortimer. If we can keep her safe for the next twenty-four hours she might live long enough to be raped and murdered in her own right. But it will take twenty-four hours to solve this case. At the moment we could never prove a thing.’ Paul smiled reassuringly at the policeman. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll give you the proof, Charlie. I promise you, I’ll give you the proof.’

  As Charlie Vosper prepared to leave there was a ring at the doorbell downstairs. ‘I’ll let them in,’ Charlie said as he shook hands with Steve. ‘Good night.’

  Paul watched him out from the landing. He watched Charlie Vosper open the front door and heard him say: ‘What the hell!’ Jennie Mortimer was standing on the step with an evening paper in one hand and a weekend case in the other.

  Chapter 13

  ‘MY dear Mrs Temple, I’ve been set up as the next murder victim. Did you expect me to sit pathetically at home and wait for the knife in my back? Look at this newspaper report!’

  ‘Don’t you have a big strong boyfriend you could stay with?’ Steve asked icily.

  Jennie shrugged. ‘It was your good-looking husband who did all the talking in front of that reporter. So why can’t he protect me until the killer is caught?’

  Paul picked up the suitcase and carried it upstairs. ‘You’re very welcome to stay.’ He passed Steve on the landing. ‘Isn’t she, darling?’

  ‘Of course. Darling.’

  ‘Let me show you to the guest room,’ said Paul.

  He led her upstairs to the room opposite their bedroom. A murderer would have to climb fifty feet of sheer wall to reach the window, or come up through the inside of the house. Paul watched her bounce on the bed and wondered whether she was truly afraid of death. She grinned at him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Paul. ‘I ought to have known better than talk to you about that meeting in front of Jack Armitage. It was obvious he would print it.’

  ‘I think you did it deliberately.’

  It was difficult to imagine Jennie dead. Her body was so full of life and pleasure. To destroy her, Paul decided, would be evil.

  ‘I’ll leave you to settle in.’

  Downstairs Steve was clearing up with grim ostentation. She clattered about in the kitchen and then spoke to Paul about the girl’s comfort with brittle formality.

  ‘I didn’t know she would turn up here,’ he said lamely.

  ‘I’m not complaining.’

  Paul poured himself a whisky. ‘It’s all right. I’ll soon have this case cleared up.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘The poor girl is scared.’

  ‘So I see.’

  It was a difficult evening. Steve became heavily ironic about the big manly protector, and then Jennie came downstairs to suggest they throw a party. ‘It would take our minds off this awful business…’ No party. But the girl spent the next forty minutes on a series of telephone calls to advise her friends that she was alive and well and living with Paul Temple. Paul Temple opened another bottle of whisky, and Steve went up to wash her hair.

  ‘Your wife’s a bit peeved, isn’t she?’

  Paul turned round and nodded. ‘Slightly.’ The girl had changed into clothes she could relax in.

  ‘Are you in love with her?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘She looks pretty tough. I don’t suppose you stood a chance once she had decided to marry you.’ Jennie draped herself along the sofa. ‘Shall we stay up talking all night? I can tell you the story of my life, for your next novel. Shall I tell you how I seduced Leo Ashwood? I did it for a dare; I could tell from the way he was always staring at me that he was twisted up with frustration. He used to stand behind me while I was playing—’

  ‘I’d rather hear about Alfred Kelby.’

  ‘I didn’t seduce Alfred. He was a sort of father to me. I think he was trying to make up for what Leo had done, poor thing.’ She laughed with her mouth open. ‘Alfred was really an English gentleman. He accepted responsibility for the actions of his servants. We didn’t sleep together till I was nineteen. Tracy Leonard was his mistress.’

  ‘Not for several years past,’ said Paul.

  She giggled complacently. ‘Do you think she’s more sexy than me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He went to the drinks tray and poured them both a whisky. He needed a change of subject. She had delicate little feet, Paul noticed, which was unusual in a woman. And she wriggled a lot. The ever-incipient boredom of the young, which tied in with the way she fidgeted with her long blonde hair.

  ‘Would you like to make love to me?’

  Paul smiled. ‘I’m in love with my wife.’

  ‘What a bore.’

  It was gone midnight and the bottle of whisky was half-empty when they all went to bed. Jennie protested she was afraid, insisted that Paul leave the bedroom door open, and appeared likely to burst into tears. But eventually they despatched her, and two minutes later they could hear her breathing deeply.

  Steve lay on her side and pretended to go straight to sleep. Paul prodded her and tried to say friendly things about how tiresome young girls can be, and surely you weren’t like that at nineteen.

  ‘If she’s still here tomorrow,’ said Steve, ‘I’ll murder her myself.’

  Paul wondered why she was being so unsympathetic to the poor girl. It wasn’t like Steve to be vindictive. Jennie was wild and she played with people’s lives, but she was engaging. Paul listened to the girl’s steady breathing in the next room. He hoped nobody would kill her.

  Tracy Leonard went into the church by herself. A single bell was tolling, calling the faithful of Melford Cross to worship. About fifty people were trailing across the green. Paul Temple locked the door of his Jaguar and joined the congregation. He took a hymn book from the verger as he entered the church, murmured: ‘Good morning,’ and sat in the pew beside Tracy Leonard. The organist was doodling a tuneless variation on a theme by Bach.

  ‘Is this a pleasant coincidence?’ Tracy Leonard whispered when she realised who was sitting next to her.

  ‘Very pleasant,’ Paul whispered.

  Her scent contrasted nicely with the dust and leather smell of the church. She looked serenely poised in the grey two piece. Paul wondered again why Alfred Kelby had let her go in favour of Jennie Mortimer.

  Paul had found himself immensely relieved as he left home. He hadn’t realised what a strain the girl’s presence imposed on them all. She was enjoying her role in the centre of a murder case. Tracy Leonard was more classically English.

  ‘Why have you come here?’ she asked.

  ‘I wanted to see you. Perhaps we could have a talk when morning service is finished. On our way up to the house.’

  She agreed. ‘But I’ve an awful lot to do. The police are still disrupting us with their questions. I’d like to be back as soon as possible.’

  The choir and vicar were moving up the aisle. The service was beginning. Paul relaxed for an hour to enjoy religion in the simple community. He appreciated Christianity with fields and animals and the wind whistling outside the church, where the changing seasons affected one’s life and men worked to produce a visible necessity for their own lives. And the congregation made a joyfully restrained English noise.

  The choir was better if you closed your eyes. They sounded enthusiastic, unsubtle and happy. They looked like the local schoolmaster, a garage mechanic, a few farm labourers and a reluctant rabble of schoolboys. Paul was oddly moved by the soloist, a fleshly man of fifty with an unhealthy face and a beautiful tenor voice. His voice soared to the beams of the church when he sang, clutching his stomach and looking absurdly pleased with himself. He was the kind of man who came into his own each Sunday, when his friends stopped laughing and the village listened to him in awe.

  It was sad, Paul th
ought, that the vicar didn’t realise the importance of his rural authenticity. He tried to relate God and his congregation to the big wide world, and so the mood was dispelled. He preached a sermon on the commandment ‘Thou shall not kill’, with exemplification from that morning’s newspaper coverage of the Kelby story. The vicar was uncompromisingly against murder. Paul wondered as the service ended and the flock moved slowly out into the midday drizzle how may people the vicar thought he had saved from life imprisonment and damnation.

  ‘Why on earth did you come here?’ Tracy asked. ‘We could perfectly well have talked at the house.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you away from the others.’

  ‘The others?’ she repeated in surprise.

  ‘Mr Ashwood, Ronnie Kelby, the police, anyone else who might be around.’

  She seemed about to say something, but she changed her mind and led the way to the gate. Paul fell into step beside her. She refused his offer of a lift in the dry Jaguar. She always walked to church and back, every Sunday. Hers was an ordered life.

  ‘What happened last night, Mr Temple?’ she asked after a moment. ‘Why was Gladys murdered?’

  ‘Because she knew who killed Alfred Kelby.’

  Tracy walked on in silence. There were flowers in the hedgerow already, but Paul didn’t know what they were. Small white flowers, probably weeds, and the fields looked very green in the slight rain. He resented the way London prevented him from knowing the time of the year. It was nearly three months since they had stayed at the cottage. He and Steve had spent Christmas there.

  ‘Who did kill him, Mr Temple?’ she asked tensely.

  ‘The same person who killed Gladys,’ he said noncommittally. ‘Miss Leonard, after we found Kelby’s body I talked to Leo Ashwood and his wife in the kitchen.’

  ‘I know,’ she said impatiently, ‘I was there.’

  ‘You weren’t in the kitchen. Mrs Ashwood said she had to go into the village because she had forgotten something.’

  ‘That’s right. A suit of Mr Kelby’s. She’d sent it to the cleaners. People worry about irrational things in moments of crisis.’

  ‘Did she return to the village?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tracy. She glanced at him sardonically. ‘Mr Reed gave her a lift.’ She clearly regarded the subject as irrelevant, but she tried to be helpful. ‘Mr Reed called round just as you left. He’d heard about the murder and of course he was very upset. He embarrassed everyone by apologising about the diary and explaining that he had never imagined it would lead to this. I just had to get rid of him.’

  Paul grinned. It was a scene he could imagine only too clearly.

  ‘So I asked him to give Gladys a lift into the village. That got rid of both of them.’

  ‘How did Gladys get back?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Her husband picked her up later.’ She faltered in her stride and turned to Paul. ‘Incidentally, Mr Reed telephoned me yesterday afternoon. He wants to talk to me about Mr Kelby’s will. Apparently he and I are the executors.’

  ‘You sound a little surprised,’ said Paul. ‘Didn’t you know Mr Kelby had appointed you an executor?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ She continued up the hill again. ‘Well, I suppose I did. He said something about it ages ago. But he was always changing his mind about wills and that sort of thing. He probably imagined that every change in his will gave him a new lease of life. He was very superstitious. He didn’t like to think that his death had been settled.’

  When they reached the top of the hill Paul looked back at the village. It was a village like most others, but the design had never been improved on. He liked it.

  ‘Look, Mr Temple, I don’t want to be rude. But you still haven’t told me what you want.’

  ‘Eh? No, that’s true. I haven’t.’ Paul smiled and turned away from the view. The road narrowed now towards Melford House. ‘Last night I stuck my neck out and told Inspector Vosper I could solve this case. I told him I could solve it within twenty-four hours, provided two people were willing to help me.’ He took her arm. ‘I was referring to you, Miss Leonard. You and a man called Arthur Grover.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of Arthur Grover.’

  Paul laughed. ‘I don’t expect you have.’

  ‘And I can’t imagine how I would be able to help you.’

  ‘I want you to go to the cinema,’ he said enigmatically. He ignored her look of astonishment. ‘I see they’re showing Vivre pour Vivre at the local cinema. It’s an excellent film. I’ve seen it twice.’

  ‘Couldn’t I go and see The Seventh Seal again in Oxford?’ she asked.

  ‘Good idea! You go and see The Seventh Seal. Go tonight.’ He kissed her on the cheek and left her wondering which of them was mad.

  Steve had finished her record sleeve. She was in the mood to be taken out and pampered. She had proved once again that she could be independent, she could be a success in her own right as a designer, so she was submissive and happy. She sat in the passenger seat of the Jaguar and watched the lights of Soho flash gaudily by.

  ‘You’ll have to spend the day in Melford Cross again, darling,’ she said mischievously. ‘Jeremy has given me a series of book jackets to design; he had some trouble with the girl who was doing them. I’ve had a very productive day.’

  Paul was silent for a moment. He decided not to rise to her bait. ‘I didn’t spend the whole day in Melford Cross. I was back in town by two o’clock. Had lunch with Scott.’

  ‘Oh.’ She wondered why Paul was looking so earnest. ‘Did he think your idea for the new novel was pompous?’

  ‘No, he thought it sounded fine. Suggested I set it in a circus, with alcoholic midgets and a fat lady hooked on heroin. The victim should be fired from a cannon into the lions’ cage because he was having an affair with a girl on the trapeze.’

  ‘How do you make love on a trapeze?’ Steve asked.

  ‘It’s difficult. That’s how the husband finds out.’

  Steve laughed. ‘So you didn’t discuss your novel with Scott. What did you talk about?’

  ‘Alfred Kelby.’

  They parked in a street behind the Casino Club and walked back. Steve was elegantly feminine in a red lace trouser suit. Paul had chosen it as a present. She wasn’t quite sure about Paul’s taste, but this evening she was pleased to be wearing it.

  ‘Why the Casino Club in particular?’ Steve asked him.

  ‘It’s owned by Arthur Grover and Neville Delamore.’

  She stopped in the entrance and turned to Paul. ‘You mean we’re here on business? I thought we were having an evening out! Just you dare spoil it, Paul, that’s all!’

  A man in an admiral’s uniform saluted them and swung the swing doors to spin them into the club. He said: ‘Good evening, sir. Madam.’ The foyer was crowded with premiere people, mink ladies and mark ten men, rich people with money to lose on the top floor. A notice on the wall said: ‘Please Don’t Touch the Pussy Cats.’

  ‘They say there’s only one original idea each century,’ Paul murmured. The female staff were scantily costumed as cats. ‘This idea was introduced into gambling back in San Francisco in 1849.’

  ‘Don’t pretend to get historical,’ said Steve, ‘just keep your attention under control.’

  ‘It’s helpful to distinguish the staff from the customers.’

  The staff had long feline tails swinging from hairless pink buttocks, while the customers wore long dresses or dark trousers; the customers had hair or pink heads whereas the staff had fur and pointed ears; the staff used eye make-up to resemble demons of the Nile. The customers wore jackets or rather ample corsets while the staff wore inadequate cat fur cups.

  ‘I thought this was my evening out?’ said Steve. ‘Why should I want to stare at all this female flesh?’

  ‘We’re mixing our pleasure with business, I’m afraid.’

  Paul took her arm and guided her gently through the crush into the cocktail bar. It was a large bar designed as a roulette table. There was a Pussy Cat
behind the bar.

  ‘Good evening. My name is Temple. Mr Grover is expecting me.’

  ‘Yes, of course sir,’ she said with a smile. ‘I’ll let Mr Grover know you’re here.’ She went to the telephone at the back of the bar.

  Paul said: ‘You remember what Arthur Grover told me about his telephone call to Ronnie Kelby on the day the old boy disappeared?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Steve. She was watching a group of men who had arrived in a party with their secretaries. A convention of Midland industrialists living it up, she decided. They obviously had tabby cats and skinny wives back home in the Midlands. Their heads rotated hypnotically as each Pussy Cat passed.

  ‘Well, he’s making another phone call tonight.’

  ‘Another call?’ Steve looked at him for a moment. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve asked him to.’

  Before Paul could explain Arthur Grover had arrived, waving his cigar and calling good evenings in all directions. He was wearing a dinner jacket that fitted him, Paul noticed, without any ugly bulges under the arm.

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Temple. What would you like to drink? A dry martini?’ He flicked his fingers at the girl behind the bar. ‘Bunty mixes the best cocktails in London.’

  Steve nodded approvingly.

  ‘I gather you’re helping my husband—’

  ‘Yes, isn’t that generous of me?’ His friendly clubman manner didn’t change as he continued: ‘An American club owner in London to stay in business has to help all kinds of people. But I keep a list of them.’ He laughed good-naturedly. ‘If I ever see your husband down on the floor I’ll kick his head in.’

  Paul laughed. The previous telephone call had been made on Monday at a quarter to nine so they stayed in the bar exchanging pleasantries. Then at a quarter to nine they went through into Grover’s office. As he passed the Pussy Cat working the lift Grover slapped her bottom loudly. The notice on the wall did not apply to him. He was still chuckling and rubbing his hands as he sat at his desk.

  ‘Of course, on Monday I used a public call box,’ he said as he picked up the phone and dialled. ‘There’s always the risk of a call being traced.’ He flashed his teeth at Steve. ‘Why don’t you sit down, Mrs Temple?’