Mortmain Hall

by Martin Edwards

  Over a decade, the small firm on the city’s outskirts had grown to become one of the largest in its field. Rolland’s hard work and determination had made him a Daimler-driving millionaire. He’d carved a reputation as a ruthless boss who believed that the end justified the means. As he ticked off his ambitions in the commercial world, he concentrated increasingly on the relentless pursuit of beautiful young women. The most recent target of his attention had been his secretary. The girl was also married, but such trifles didn’t concern Rolland. His obsession with Phoebe Evison had driven his wife to the brink of a nervous breakdown.

  The car Jim and Eileen had heard starting up was presumably Rolland’s Daimler. That too was missing. Where he’d driven to after leaving his bungalow, nobody knew.

  The urgency of the hunt for Rolland intensified with news from the forensic pathologist. The killer had strangled the deceased with bare hands. She’d been ten weeks pregnant.

  *

  The dead woman was identified as Phoebe Evison even before Mrs Rolland was interviewed. Phoebe’s older sister Maisie came forward as soon as a description was circulated. Phoebe was twenty-two, a typist who had joined Rolland Castings six months before to become the chairman’s confidential secretary. The pay was exceptional by Liverpool standards, but she’d fallen out with her husband as a result of taking the job.

  “Why would that be?” asked a sympathetic police sergeant.

  “A born troublemaker, is Dermot Evison. Jealous, too, and bitter. Hated seeing Phoebe get on. Out of work himself, with no prospect of a decent position. As far as he was concerned, Rolland was a filthy capitalist who exploited his workers. Phoebe was consorting with the enemy. But Phoebe said they couldn’t rely on what Evison brought in from doing odd jobs for his mates. They had to eat. And she loved looking nice.”

  “How did she get on with Henry Rolland?”

  “Phoebe was bonny, and she knew it. I warned her Evison was a good-for-nothing, but did she take any notice? Not likely. Headstrong, that was poor Phoebe. You couldn’t tell her anything.”

  “Was something going on between her and Rolland?”

  Maisie sniffed. “Rich men who employ a pretty girl are usually after only one thing. And I’ll tell you this for nothing. It isn’t help with the filing.”

  *

  Henry Rolland’s movements during Friday afternoon were quickly traced. Following lunch with a supplier, he’d spent half an hour closeted in his private office with Phoebe Evison, and then had a meeting with his chief engineer. Rolland had left the factory on the dot of five, before his secretary. After that, his trail went cold.

  The investigators could picture what had happened. The couple made their way separately to the bungalow, and Phoebe put on her nightgown. Her aim was to create a mood of romance prior to breaking the news that she was expecting a baby.

  When the bombshell dropped, Rolland’s reaction was easy to predict. Was the child his or her husband’s? Not that Rolland cared; he’d pay whatever was needed to make the problem go away.

  But Phoebe was desperate for a child of her own. The pregnancy was the perfect reason to persuade her lover to divorce his wife while she ended her marriage to her feckless husband. She’d give up work, and the three of them could live happily ever after.

  Easy to see how a quarrel might start. Cajolery fails, complaints and accusations fly around. Threats are made, voices are raised. Two angry people, neither willing to back down. The woman becomes frightened, and opens the door, about to run out into the open in her chemise. Making a spectacle of herself, humiliating her lover.

  He needs to stop her. When he grabs hold of her, she screams. He must shut her up. Hands around her throat, squeezing…

  Within moments, she is silent. Her limp body sags. He’s gone too far.

  He is beside himself with fear. All he knows is that he has to get away. Impossible to go home. He must hide, even though he knows in his heart that he can’t run forever.

  Yes, it would be something like that.

  *

  Phoebe had kept quiet about her plans for the weekend, which the other typists said was par for the course. They regarded her as a brazen schemer who had set out to seduce her boss, with disgusting success. For her part, she did her best to ignore her colleagues. None of them had noticed her suitcase; she’d made sure she was first to arrive in the office that day, and the last one to leave. She’d travelled to the Wirral on her own, by taxi.

  Dermot Evison wasn’t at home when the police hammered on the door of his scruffy terraced house in Vauxhall. When questioned about him, the people who lived on either side wrinkled their noses. They’d seen neither hide nor hair of him for the past few days. What’s more, whenever they did see him again, it would be too soon.

  Evison was a firebrand. All his life, he’d campaigned with a fierce passion for unfashionable causes, but at the age of forty, he was running to seed. He had a weakness for Guinness as well as a hair-trigger temper. These days he dissolved into tears of maudlin self-pity as often as he flared into rage.

  The marriage to Phoebe was his second. His first wife put up with adultery and repeated beatings over the years, but obtained a divorce after he was sent to prison for affray.

  Even before that, he was known to the police. The most remarkable discovery that detectives made about Dermot Evison was that he’d once been one of their own. For six months after the war, he held the office of constable in the Liverpool City force.

  *

  Henry Rolland was not a man to do things by halves. When handing himself in to the authorities, he wasn’t content to appear at his local police station. Instead, he reported to Scotland Yard.

  The suave, well-groomed businessman was now haggard and unshaven. He wanted to make a clean breast of things, he said, and he didn’t mean to insult anyone’s intelligence with a string of crude denials. Yes, he’d bought the bungalow under a false name and he made no bones about his motive. It was convenient for illicit assignations, only a few miles from home as the crow flew, but on the other side of the water from Liverpool. There was little risk of being recognised as long as he kept his head down. Since buying the property, he’d taken a succession of friends there. Those ladies meant nothing to him. With Phoebe Evison, it was very different.

  Phoebe’s vivacity appealed to him as much as her looks, but it had taken time to break down her defences. Her insistence that she was a married woman who believed in “until death do us part” simply fuelled his desire. When she finally agreed to spend a single night with him in the bungalow, it was the happiest moment of his life.

  Phoebe made him feel young again. They began to make plans for divorcing their spouses and marrying after a decent interval. At a rendezvous at the bungalow the weekend before her death, Phoebe had broken the news that she was pregnant. The child was his, beyond question. She’d stopped having relations with her husband months ago; he’d no doubt she was telling him the truth. The news that they were to become parents made him ecstatic. He wasn’t bothered about decent intervals. The divorces and their marriage must take place as soon as possible.

  His response thrilled her, but she urged caution. Dermot Evison was violent as well as jealous. He’d need careful handling. They’d work out their plans in detail at the bungalow the following weekend. Meanwhile, Henry would provoke a row with his wife, so that she’d move out; the first step in the separation.

  He spent the week in a daze of happiness, untouched even by a bitter quarrel with his wife. Once she’d packed her bags, he suggested to Phoebe that they spend the weekend together at his home in Sefton Park. She wouldn’t hear of it. They’d meet at the bungalow, just as before, until she’d made the break from Evison. She was afraid he suspected their affair, and she couldn’t take the risk that in his fury at the betrayal, he might hurt her lover. Or even kill him.

  At this point, Rolland’s stiff upper lip gave way and he dissolved into tears.

  When he recovered, he explained that he’d turned u
p at the bungalow at the appointed time. Phoebe had promised she’d be ready and waiting in her new satin chemise.

  But he was too late. Dermot Evison had reached the bungalow before him.

  Phoebe was right to suspect that her husband was capable of murder. Her mistake was to believe that Evison would kill her lover. He’d taken his revenge by strangling her.

  *

  The police didn’t take Rolland’s statement at face value. Too much was open to question. Why hadn’t he driven straight from the factory to the bungalow, ready to greet his mistress? His story was that he’d gone back home first, because he’d forgotten to pack his own suitcase, but nobody had seen him.

  Rolland claimed that Phoebe had her own key to the bungalow, but it hadn’t been found. And what of the scream that Jim and Eileen had heard, shortly before the car engine started up? All Rolland could say was that, after finding Phoebe’s corpse, he’d cried out in horror and disbelief. The young couple were wrong to jump to the conclusion that the shriek came from a woman; it was understandable, but they were mistaken.

  He said he’d fled from the bungalow because he was terrified. The woman he loved had been brutally murdered. Her husband must be responsible, and he could only hang once. For all Rolland knew, Dermot Evison was lurking in the vicinity of the bungalow, ready to kill again.

  Numb with shock, he’d driven aimlessly through the night. He couldn’t go back to Sefton Park. He was too afraid of how things would look. His mistress had been strangled in his bungalow, and he was the obvious suspect, despite the strength of Evison’s motive. The publicity surrounding the crime, he maintained, proved the point.

  His vagueness about his movements was unsatisfactory. He claimed to have snatched an hour or two of sleep in his car during the early hours of Saturday, before making his way to London. There he booked in to a seedy boarding house in Hackney. Poring over the newspapers, in which he was practically accused of killing Phoebe, he realised that, whatever the cost, he had no choice but to come forward and try to clear his name.

  *

  In Liverpool, the police were piecing together the story of Dermot Evison’s life. Time and again, he’d been sacked for insubordination. He spent much of the war in a military hospital after being badly wounded on the battlefield. When peace came, he joined the police, but his career ended in ignominy. A radical to his bones, he joined the local branch of the newly formed National Union of Police and Prison Officers and took a leading role in organising picket lines during the strike of 1919. The mutiny crumbled and he was dismissed from the force.

  After that, Evison drifted from job to job; his drinking companions were political agitators, and he was forever arguing for higher wages and better working conditions. On one occasion, a row with a foreman led to a fist fight. The foreman was badly beaten, and Evison was sent to gaol.

  His wife divorced him, but on the day of his release, he met Phoebe and swept her off her feet. Within six weeks they were man and wife, but following the General Strike, employers viewed Evison and his kind with suspicion. To keep afloat, he had to resort to odd-job work. That, and relying on his smart young wife’s earnings.

  Three days after his wife’s murder, the police broke into a disused shed in Everton. It belonged to a toolmaker, an old Communist pal of Evison, who was at present serving a prison sentence for obstructing the King’s highway.

  Evison’s body was hanging from a rafter. On the floor below his feet was a note. Only with difficulty could they decipher the wild scrawl.

  She deserved what she got but I can’t live without her.

  *

  The sun was scorching Jacob’s forehead as he reached the final page. He’d forgotten to bring a hat. The park was packed with parents strolling around in conversation as their children filled the air with whoops of glee. A young couple had squeezed down on to the bench next to Jacob, and were kissing noisily.

  Two hundred miles away, Henry Rolland was also probably relishing the sunshine. The police had never charged him. For all the oddities and gaps in his testimony, there was no proof that he’d lied. Without fuss or fanfare, the police investigation fizzled out. At the inquest into Phoebe’s death, the coroner suggested that Evison’s history, coupled with his suicide and the note he’d left, made the jury’s task straightforward. They took the hint, and named Evison as Phoebe’s murderer.

  According to Leonora Dobell, Rolland didn’t survive the scandal unscathed. His wife divorced him, and the company suffered. After selling his shares to a competitor for a quarter of their previous value, he buried himself in a quiet village in Cheshire. He was still a wealthy man, with decades of life ahead of him.

  Leonora’s concluding paragraphs were worded, Jacob thought, with a politician’s flair for evasion. The dead were fair game, but she was too shrewd to shoot accusations at the living, especially if they had the money and ammunition to fire back in court.

  Even so, he was sure Leonora suspected that Phoebe’s murderer was not her husband, but Henry Rolland.

  12

  “Are you certain?” Jacob leaned back in his office chair, trying to make sense of what he’d been told.

  “Quite certain.”

  Ice entered the voice at the other end of the line. The secretary of Harrogate Ladies’ College did not expect her word to be questioned by a London journalist, even if he did speak in a Yorkshire accent.

  “Not for any period, however short?”

  “Our record-keeping is second to none, Mr Flint. I can assure you that we have no record of a pupil called Slaterbeck. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I have other matters to attend to. Good morning.”

  The secretary put down the phone, leaving Jacob to frown at the heap of directories on his desk. He’d spent half the morning trying to find out something about Leonora Dobell, and he’d set about the task methodically. Begin at the beginning, Gomersall advised reporters researching a story. Jacob hadn’t expected Leonora’s beginnings to be shrouded in mystery.

  Slaterbeck was an uncommon surname, and he’d not been able to trace either Leonora or her father. It was as if she’d never existed prior to her marriage. He opened the office copy of Who’s Who, where he’d bookmarked her entry. As he stared at it, the truth finally dawned.

  Who’s Who relied on the good faith of the great and the good; it wasn’t seemly to double-check every piece of information it was given. The old witch had named her father as N.O. Slaterbeck as a joke.

  There was literally no Slaterbeck.

  *

  “Delighted to meet you, Miss Savernake.” Leonora Dobell extended her hand in greeting. They were outside the main entrance to the home of the Royal Academy in Burlington House. “Not that I think of you as a stranger. We have a great deal in common. I feel as if I’ve known you for a long time.”

  “You’re a student of the criminal mind.” Rachel gripped the older woman’s hand. “Perhaps I should be apprehensive.”

  “I hear you take after your father. He didn’t have a nerve in his body.”

  “It’s no secret,” Rachel said. “There was no love lost between the Judge and me.”

  “Surely as he became older, increasingly frail…”

  “All I will say is this. Nobody shed any tears when he died. Certainly not me.”

  Leonora studied her, as if trying to fathom a cipher. “Such a pity, family quarrels. I was devoted to my own father. As for Judge Savernake… well, you could say that everything I’ve done since has been inspired by the Judge.”

  Rachel looked into the dark, glittering eyes. Leonora gazed back at her. Like opponents in a fencing duel, each was trying to get the measure of the other.

  “I prefer not to think about him, Mrs Dobell,” Rachel said. “Or should I call you Miss Slaterbeck?”

  “Leonora, please.” The older woman beamed. “I hate people standing on ceremony. I suspect you feel the same. Ever since I learned of your arrival in London, I’ve longed to meet you.”

  “When you told Jacob Flint you
wanted to talk to me about murder, you didn’t explain what you had in mind.”

  “Mr Flint is young and charming, but he’s a journalist to his inky fingertips. Ingenuous as he seems, I’m sure you watch your words with him. As I did.”

  “You bumped into him by accident?”

  “He thought so.” Leonora gave a sly smile. “Between you and me, I made sure we had the chance of a conversation. I’d heard you and he are acquainted.”

  “You’re well informed.”

  “It’s my business to be. My researches keep me in touch with Scotland Yard, and your name cropped up. Not that anyone seems to have deduced much about you, not even Jacob Flint. Murder obsesses you, that’s perfectly clear. What isn’t quite so obvious is… why?”

  “People might say the same about you,” Rachel said.

  Leonora stared hard at her. “Touché.”

  Rachel waved towards the Palladian splendour of Burlington House. “You’re an art lover, I believe. Isn’t the Mortmain collection one of the finest in Yorkshire?”

  Leonora sighed. “Unfortunately, maintaining the property and estate is wickedly expensive. My husband needs nursing care, and my royalties are swallowed up by everyday expenses. When the roof springs a leak or the carpets need replacing, I have to auction an oil painting to pay the bill.”

  “Eminently practical. And your husband approves?”

  “Nowadays, Felix’s life revolves around completing jigsaw puzzles and flirting with his nurses. The latest woman is especially tiresome. She encourages him to snipe at me. But her wages don’t come out of thin air. Hence the need to sell the pictures. He understands that there is no alternative.”