Choice of Evils

by E. X. Ferrars

  ‘Very likely I am,’ Andrew agreed. ‘I've only been trying to make sense of a small but rather odd incident.’

  ‘But how could Rachel have found out about Lizbeth not being married?’ Cecily asked. ‘After all, there is that photograph. There was a marriage.’

  ‘Which just possibly could have been bigamous, if Professor Basnett is right,’ her husband said thoughtfully. ‘How Rachel might have found it out, if she did, I suppose we shall never know.’

  ‘Is this what the police came to see you about this morning?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘No, they only wanted to check that Rachel had been with me in the afternoon, and the time that she left the office. They asked me what she'd consulted me about, and I said the law governing intestacy and that was all. They didn't seem much interested in that. It was the time she left the office that they really wanted to know about.’

  'Suppose, which I don't for a moment, the marriage was bigamous,’ Cecily pursued, ‘and suppose Rachel somehow found it out, why did she do nothing about it till yesterday afternoon? It doesn't really seem to me convincing. I think she was just a greedy girl who hoped there was something in it for her when she heard about the intestacy.’

  ‘You may be right,’ Andrew said. ‘In any case, we certainly don't know the whole story.’

  He left soon after that, after refusing a cup of tea, and started on the walk back to Gallmouth.

  Two little girls came running after him as he let himself out of the garden into the road. They pranced along, one on each side of him.

  ‘Are you a detective?’ the one he had met before asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Then why have you been asking Mum and Dad so much?’

  From that he deduced that she and her friend had been listening at the door of the sitting-room.

  That's quite a question,’ he said. ‘I wish I knew the answer.’

  The answer, of course, was Peter. The last person to see Rachel alive, the first to find her dead. It was inevitable that he should be suspected.

  By now it was possible that some other person, or even more than one, had come forward with a statement of having seen Rachel after her visit to Edward Clarke's office, and unless it could be proved that she and Peter had known each other before their visit to Gallmouth, no motive for his killing her could be suggested. But it was not necessary to prove a motive when it came to an arrest for murder. Undoubtedly it helped, but life could be made very frightening for Peter without it. So if Andrew could do anything to help him, he would certainly do it. The visit to the Clarkes had turned out moderately useful. It had helped to confirm in Andrew's mind certain possibilities that he had been considering, particularly since his visit to Mrs Wale that morning. Not there was any-thing very definite about them, but they formed a pattern of sorts and that was interesting. He was so absorbed in it that he had almost reached the Dolphin before the bishop of Rum-ti-Foo began to bother him.

  He found Peter waiting for him in the hotel. He was in one of the easy chairs in the lounge with a tea-tray beside him, and was just resisting the temptation of the cakes on the trolley that the nice-looking young waitress had wheeled up to him. She was just about to push it away when Andrew stopped her, ordered tea and chose a cake similar to the one that he had enjoyed after his arrival in the Dolphin, when no thought of murder had yet entered his mind. Its presence there now had not disturbed his appetite, however, and his walk had even stimulated it. There were not many other people in the lounge and it seemed as good a place to talk as any.

  ‘Glad to find you here,’ he said to Peter, settling in a chair near to his. ‘What kept you?’

  Peter poured out his tea.

  ‘A statement,’ he said. T had to go to the police station and make a statement and sign it. Where have you been?’

  ‘Out to see our friends, the Clarkes,’ Andrew said. ‘But tell me, Peter, was this just a routine thing, or do you think they seriously suspect you?’

  Once more the police were 'they’, that faceless, anonymous abstraction.

  ‘I wish I knew,’ Peter answered. T think if I was them, I'd suspect me. But it's difficult to think of oneself in those terms. Why did you go to the Clarkes’?’

  ‘To see if I could find out anything about the visit Rachel paid Clarke in the afternoon.’

  ‘And did you find out anything?’

  ‘I think so, though it was more or less what I expected. She wanted to know what the law governing intestacy was. But Clarke didn't seem to have asked himself why she wanted to know that. I think it was quite a surprise to him when I suggested that the Amorys perhaps hadn't been legally married. Mrs Clarke proclaimed that she had seen a wedding photograph of the pair, and if she really had, it leads one on to wondering if that marriage could have been bigamous. But of course, there was nothing definite in what we talked about. Perhaps their marriage was absolutely legal. I've only been wondering if there could be any other explanation of Rachel's sudden excitement at the information that her sister had died intestate.’

  ‘You're assuming, of course, that she knew that the marriage hadn't been legal,’ Peter said. ‘How do you think that came about?’

  ‘It could have come about in all sorts of ways, couldn't it?’ Andrew said. ‘It's possible that her sister married Amory in good faith. I don't pretend to understand why he should have wanted it. One has to assume that he'd been married very young, that it hadn't worked, and he and his wife had simply separated without bothering about divorce. And he knew that he couldn't have the Rayne girl without marriage, so he failed to inform her that he already had a wife. And then perhaps, years later, she somehow discovered the fact, though I don't know how. Perhaps his first wife appeared on the scene and made trouble. And then Mrs Amory must have told Rachel what she'd just found out. Didn't she pay a visit to her in America some time ago? Perhaps she told her then; in fact, it might have been the reason for the visit. Perhaps she wanted to discuss the situation with someone, because after all, bigamy is breaking the law, but if that's how it happened they must have decided to keep quiet about it.’

  ‘You haven't any proof of any of this,’ Peter said.

  ‘No, but it could easily enough be found, by some investigation at Somerset House - that's to say, the place that's succeeded it, where they keep all the records of births, marriages and deaths. The question is, do I tell all this theorizing of mine to the inspector, or do I leave him to think it out for himself?’

  Andrew bit into his cream bun and looked questioningly at Peter.

  He wrinkled his forehead in a doubtful frown.

  ‘You can't do anyone any harm by telling Mayhew about it, can you?’ he said. 'The person who'd suffer by it if it was true is of course Amory, but if he can quite easily prove that he was legally married there'd be no damage done. So why not take Mayhew into your confidence?’

  ‘That's what I feel myself until I actually think of doing it,’ Andrew said. 'Then I think it would make Amory obviously the chief suspect, and I feel a sort of reluctance to do that.’

  ‘You're forgetting he's got an alibi. He was playing chess with Mina Todhunter.’

  ‘Who'd probably swear to anything he wanted her to.’

  ‘Do you really think that?’

  ‘Oh, I don't know. I don't know anything about their relationship. She may be the last person he'd want to find out about the bigamy and all. They're certainly close friends. I wish we knew why Rachel went to see her yesterday morning. What was the advice she wanted? I don't believe for a moment it had anything to do with writing for children, or even about writing at all. If that had been what she wanted, hadn't she Amory to ask, and you, who could have been much more helpful than Todhunter if what she wanted to know was a little about how to find an agent, or something of that sort. And having been given what she called a brush-off by Todhunter, she talked about wanting advice from me, didn't she? Well, if it was anything to do with writing, that hardly makes sense.’

  Peter nodd
ed thoughtfully.

  ‘But have you any ideas about it?’ he asked. ‘Even wild ideas, with no proofs at all. I seem to remember you're rather given to that.’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I have,’ Andrew answered hesitantly. ‘It's simply that Amory never wrote any of his books. It's my belief that they were all written by his wife.’

  ‘Good Lord, Andrew, that's wild even for you!’ Peter looked really startled. ‘Whatever made you think of that?’

  ‘An address book that Mayhew showed me this morning.’

  Peter gave a sigh. He leant back in his chair, stretching his legs out before him and crossing his ankles.

  ‘Hadn't you better tell me all about it?’ he said.

  ‘It's what I've been wanting to do,’ Andrew answered. ‘You see, Mayhew wanted to see me this morning, and among other things he showed me an address book which had belonged to Amory's wife. He asked me to look at it and see if anything about it struck me. But before I could get around to doing that the news broke that Magda Braile's body had been found and he'd no time to wait around for me to get to work on the book. He dashed out with a lot of other men, leaving the book with me. So I stayed where I was and studied it and found that under the heading "Typist", there was an address of a Mrs Wale in Linwood Drive. That seemed to me suggestive, and I set off to Linwood Drive straight away. I found it and I found Mrs Wale and had a talk with her and she told me that she'd typed two novels by Mrs Amory, which in what she called her humble opinion weren't much good, but that she'd never done anything for Mr Amory. Now what do you make of that, Peter?’

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ Peter said, ‘except that in the last year or two of her life Mrs Amory tried her hand at writing, but without any success. Then some time after she'd died, Simon tried it and produced the remarkable best-seller. Death Come Quickly, but he didn't get it typed by Mrs Wale. In fact, he may even have typed it himself.’

  ‘And after its extraordinary success he produced two fairly inferior novels which, it's thought, probably only got published because they had his name on them?’

  ‘I believe that's correct. I haven't read either of them.’

  ‘Well, that makes sense, but suppose you look at the sequence of events a little differently. Suppose you assume Mrs Amory wrote those first two novels, learning her craft as she went, and then something happened to her that brought that third novel to the surface. But she was a dying woman by then and though she finished it, she never did anything about it, didn't even get it typed and sent off to her agent, if she had one. And it lay in her drawer until some time after her death, when it occurred to Amory that he might see if he could get it published. But something made him send it off under his own name instead of hers. Perhaps he thought that publishers wouldn't look too favourably on a book that had been written by someone who was dead and couldn't produce anything more. But he may have done it fairly innocently, wanting it published in her memory as much as anything else, and it may be that the last thing he dreamt of was that he'd become a celebrity. But when it happened he couldn't bring himself to own the truth. It would have been too humiliating. If the facts had become known too he would have looked a selfish fool. So he's stuck to his fame and his fortune, his one problem being that he can't produce any more. He got those two first novels by his wife published, and both seem to have been failures, but now he's absolutely stuck, beginning to be thought of as someone who's written himself out and will never do anything more.’ Andrew took another bite of his cream bun. ‘Well, what do you think of it?’

  Peter gave a sardonic little laugh.

  ‘It's a good story, and I can't prove it isn't true.

  Whatever made you think of it?’

  ‘You don't believe in it then?’

  ‘I didn't say that. I'm only curious how you thought of it in the first place. I don't believe it came simply from reading that address book and talking to Mrs Wale.’

  ‘No, I think I had my first intimations of it when I heard about those manuscripts in the desk in the summerhouse going missing. It didn't seem conceivable that Rachel was murdered to get possession of them. They couldn't have been as valuable as all that. But they could have been removed by someone who didn't want them to be seen. They were in Mrs Amory's handwriting, weren't they? Or at least two of them were. And if they were found, it wouldn't have been to Amory's advantage. He may have kept them ever since his wife's death out of sentiment, but with Rachel looking for them, as she obviously was when you had that glimpse of her running out of the summerhouse on Friday evening, they could have become a deadly danger to the famous personality that he'd built up.’

  ‘You think Rachel knew the truth then about all this - or what you're inclined to think is the truth?’

  ‘I believe so. I think it's the motive for her murder.’

  Peter poured out more tea for himself, then sat back, frowning into space.

  ‘Of course, you think Amory did it,’ he said after a little.

  ‘I haven't got as far as that,’ Andrew said.

  ‘But if you're right about all this, who else could it be?’

  ‘I don't know.’

  ‘Oh, come, Andrew, don't dither. Of course it's what you think.’

  ‘There's still his alibi to be explained.’

  ‘I thought we were rather inclined to believe that Todhunter would swear to anything to help him.’

  ‘I think that's probably true,’ Andrew said, ‘but there's something about that alibi that shouldn't be forgotten. When I phoned her to get Amory's address, she asked me if I would like to speak to him. I didn't actually do so. I couldn't swear that he was there. But would she have taken a risk like that if he hadn't been with her? Suppose I'd asked to speak to him and he wasn't there, what would she have done? Said that he was so deep in his game of chess that she didn't after all want to disturb him, or that at just that moment he'd gone to the loo? No, I don't think she'd have risked it. I think he was there in the room with her when I phoned.’

  ‘But suppose he'd only just got in. Suppose the murder happened rather earlier than we've been thinking.’

  ‘It's possible.’

  ‘And aren't we rather overlooking the death of Magda Braile?’

  ‘Yes,’ Andrew said. ‘But I've had a feeling that we should deal with one thing at a time. Apart from anything, it seems to me probable that the two things are related, and that the murder, if that's what it was, of Magda Braile won't be solved until the other one is sorted out.’

  ‘Oh, I'm sure that's right,’ Peter said. ‘In fact, it seems to me that the most probable explanation of it is that whoever shot and killed Rachel was on his way down into the town by that cliff path, the one that's hidden from the road by that grove of beech trees, and he met Magda coming up it on her walk and she recognized him, perhaps even greeted him, and was rewarded by being pushed over the edge of the cliff. In its way, that's simple.’

  ‘Unless we're somehow thinking of this whole thing upside down,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Well, I think I'd better be getting back now.’ Peter finished his tea and stood up. ‘I'll phone you if anything of interest happens, such as finding those missing manu-scripts. Did I tell you that the police are searching the house from top to bottom and they haven't told me why, but what it can be for if it isn't the manuscripts, I can't think. Perhaps Mayhew's thinking more or less along the same lines as you, though he doesn't want to talk about it. There's a way, you know, that they could prove a good deal of it if they could find them.’

  ‘Prove it?’ Andrew said. That had not occurred to him.

  ‘Yes, if your Mrs Wale recognized them as the work of Mrs Amory, which she'd copied while Mrs Amory was still alive, and then she was shown the two supposed works of Amory that came out after Death Come Quickly, she could say who the real author was, couldn't she? Not that that would prove that he didn't write Death Come Quickly, but it would certainly cast a good deal of doubt on it.’

  ‘Well, tell all this that we've bee
n talking about to the inspector, will you, if he's still up at the house when you get there? If he isn't…’ Andrew paused.

  ‘Yes?’ Peter said.

  ‘Just let me know. I'd feel inclined to hunt him down myself.’

  But once Peter had gone and Andrew was alone and had finished his tea his theory that Simon Amory had not written his three books began to seem to him absurd. For one thing, it took for granted that Amory was the murderer of Rachel Rayne, and that was something that Andrew was not yet quite prepared to do, though if he were to hear that he had been taken in for questioning by the evening it would not surprise him. It would, of course, mean that Mina Todhunter had taken a great risk in offering to let Andrew speak to Amory on her telephone, but perhaps she had simply done that.

  'So there you are,’ a voice said behind Andrew. ‘I've been rather hoping I'd find you.’

  He started round and saw Detective Inspector Mayhew standing in the doorway.

  CHAPTER 7

  The inspector came across the room to Andrew and dropped into the chair where Peter had been sitting. His big slab of a face had a sagging, tired look.

  I'm sorry I had to leave you so suddenly this morning,’ he said. 'The news of the discovery of Magda Braile's body had just come in and I had to get out to the spot as quickly as possible.’

  'So I supposed,’ Andrew said. ‘But I didn't follow you out for some time. I found that address book an interesting thing to study.’

  ‘Because of the typist?’

  ‘Mrs Wale? Yes. I went to see her, you know. I suppose we were both interested in her for the same reason.’

  ‘Because of the possibility that she'd typed Amory's manuscripts for him?’