Murder by Numbers

by Eric Brown

  FOUR

  Holly Beckwith screamed. Hermione Goudge moaned and slipped from her chair in a dead faint, her husband crying out in alarm. Crispin Proudfoot vomited – but not before reaching the fireplace and the Chinese urn standing beside it, into which he noisily dispatched the contents of his stomach.

  Langham turned to Maria. ‘Are you up to finding the butler and telling him to phone the police?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She stood and hurried from the room.

  George Goudge was kneeling beside his wife and ineffectively patting her hand. He glanced at the corpse, lolling in the chair. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do for him?’

  Dr Bryce, standing over the body, gave the little man a withering look. ‘What the hell do you think, for God’s sake? He’s just shot himself through the blasted head!’

  While Proudfoot and Beckwith moved to a chaise longue before the hearth, Langham joined the doctor.

  The entry wound at the temple was tiny, but the bullet had blown a disproportionately large hole in the left side of the skull. A section of bone, like a broken teacup, was lying on the floor against the bookcase, and a spray of blood and brain matter was spattered across the calf-bound volumes. The artist’s head hung over the side of the chair, bleeding on to the Persian rug.

  The doctor was shaking uncontrollably. ‘There was nothing we could have done,’ Bryce said. ‘You saw what happened. I’m his doctor, and even I never saw this coming.’

  Langham crossed the room to a drinks cabinet and poured three stiff measures of whisky. He passed one to the doctor, who accepted it with a nod, and one to George Goudge, who was patting his unconscious wife’s cheek and murmuring futile entreaties.

  Langham drained his own glass, then asked Beckwith and Proudfoot if they’d care for a whisky. The poet declined with a grimace, but the actress nodded and smiled her gratitude. He poured two further measures – one more for himself – and joined the pair.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting …’ the actress began, gesturing towards the corpse. ‘I feel …’ She shook her head, falling silent.

  Proudfoot said, ‘Guilty?’ His voice shook. ‘That’s how I feel, to be perfectly honest. To think, for all those years he was storing up his hatred, planning this. That’s what he wanted, you know: he wanted us to feel responsible, guilty. It was his way of avenging himself.’

  Beckwith stared at the poet with huge ice-blue eyes. ‘But I was well within my rights! He took advantage of me, and—’

  Langham interrupted, ‘In my opinion, Fenton was deranged. His work fell out of favour, and then he had a terrible war. If you ask me, he was looking for excuses to hate people. You just happened to be his unlucky victims.’

  The actress shook her head. ‘It could have been worse, I suppose. For a second, I thought he was about to shoot us!’

  The poet leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees. ‘Can you begin to imagine the state of his mind? The festering hatred! We’re all responsible – we all shall bear the guilt. All of us!’

  Langham shook his head. ‘Rubbish, man. That’s exactly what he wanted you to feel. His self-hatred exaggerated your perceived slights out of all proportion. He treated my wife abysmally when she was barely a woman – then didn’t like it when she stood up for herself.’

  Proudfoot held his head in his hands. Beckwith jumped to her feet and paced back and forth, her knuckles pressed to her rouged lips.

  The door opened and Maria appeared. She looked flustered and gestured for Langham to join her.

  ‘Maria?’

  ‘The butler – I saw him leave the house.’ She took his hand and pulled him from the room. ‘It looked as if he was running away.’

  They hurried down the corridor, Maria adding, ‘I rang for the police and an ambulance.’

  The front door stood ajar. Langham ran out into the driving rain. He was in time to see the tail lights of a small car receding into the darkness, not down the main drive but along a track to the left of the house. He took off in futile pursuit, arrived at the corner of the building and came to a halt, panting, as he watched the car disappear through a plantation of pine trees.

  Maria joined him. ‘But why did he …?’ she called against the wind.

  Langham shook his head, cursing the weather.

  He put his arm around her shoulders and turned back to the house. They were passing a conservatory attached to the west wing when he stopped and stared through the glass.

  ‘Donald?’

  He moved to the conservatory door and tried the handle. The door was locked, but the wooden frame was rotting; when he applied his shoulder and pressed, the door gave way. In the silvered light of the full moon, he found a light switch and turned it on. An unshaded bulb revealed what must have been Maxwell Fenton’s studio, many years ago.

  Maria joined him as he moved to a row of six canvases leaning against the wall.

  The painting that had caught his attention showed a younger Hermione Goudge, sitting sideways on a window seat and looking almost pretty.

  Even more noticeable was the fact that the painting had been vandalized. Three diagonal slashes scored the canvas from corner to corner.

  ‘And look,’ Maria said, pointing.

  Beside the painting of Goudge was one of her husband, a head and shoulders portrait of a younger, much slimmer version of the man, likewise slashed. Next came a reclining nude of the actress Holly Beckwith, her beauty defaced by three lateral rips; then one of Crispin Proudfoot, sitting cross-legged on a lawn, also vandalized. Alongside it was a close-up of Dr Bryce’s bloated face, savagely rent.

  Langham moved to the very last portrait. This one was of Maria at the age of eighteen. She had a tumble of raven-black hair, high cheekbones and red, laughing lips. The girl stared from the canvas with a joyous look in her wide brown eyes.

  She was recognizably his wife, yet innocent, still almost a child, far too young to be taken advantage of by an immoral artist.

  Maria fingered the ripped canvas. ‘I remember the girl I was, and how frightened I was when … when he tried to …’ She paused, swallowed and turned from the painting. ‘When he’d completed the portrait,’ she said, ‘that’s when it happened, and I struck him.’

  ‘In here?’

  She shook her head. ‘In the drawing room.’ She pressed a hand against her cheek and stared at Langham. ‘If he’d tried it in here … My God, what would I have done? There was nothing I might have picked up to hit him with. At least we were in the drawing room, near the fireplace.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said, ‘and it’s all over now.’

  ‘But what happened tonight …’ Her voice caught. ‘He’d let it fester, all the hatred.’

  ‘As I told Proudfoot just now,’ he said, ‘I think Fenton was mad.’

  Maria reached out, lifted her portrait and turned it to face the wall.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Donald, about what happened just now.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense. What he said, and then what he did.’

  ‘All that about you getting what you all deserved, and then his killing himself? Yes, it struck me as odd, too.’

  ‘It was as if he wanted to frighten us with the threat of punishment and yet in the end punished only himself. Unless he thought our “just desserts” would be the guilt we might feel.’

  ‘Perhaps that was it,’ he said, uneasy that she had reached the same conclusion. ‘But you must remember that he wasn’t rational. I’m not at all sure that what he was thinking at the end would make any kind of sense.’

  She nodded, frowning at the defaced canvases.

  He squeezed her shoulder. ‘Come on, we’d better be getting back to the others.’

  Maria indicated the door connecting the conservatory to the main body of the building, and they passed down a long, dimly lit corridor towards the distant hallway.

  She paused before they entered the library. ‘Donald, why do you think the butler ra
n off like that?’

  ‘I’m not at all sure. Maybe he saw what’d happened and took fright – he didn’t want to be implicated. Rash, because by skedaddling as he did, he makes himself look suspicious.’

  Dr Bryce had had the foresight to place a folding bamboo screen before the seated corpse – which served only to draw the eye to the mess of blood on the books and the fragment of skull in the corner.

  Hermione Goudge had revived, thanks to a brandy that her husband was holding to her lips. She pushed it away and called out, ‘I want to go home, now!’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible,’ Langham said. ‘The police are on their way.’

  ‘The police?’ She stared at him with the pop-eyes of the Pekinese she so closely resembled. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘The police need to take our individual statements in order to satisfy themselves that no foul play has taken place.’

  ‘“Foul play”?’ she said. ‘What the blazes are you suggesting?’

  He sighed. ‘I’m suggesting nothing, other than that the police will keep an open mind as to what happened here until our collective statements indicate the facts.’

  ‘I refuse to be interrogated like a common criminal. George, take me away from this infernal place!’

  ‘You’re going nowhere,’ Dr Bryce said, standing over her. ‘Langham’s right. George, for God’s sake, get another brandy to shut her up.’

  ‘There, there, dear,’ George said, patting her hand before hurrying off to refill the glass.

  Holly Beckwith ceased her pacing and stared at Langham. ‘But what shall we tell the police?’

  ‘We tell them exactly what happened,’ he said. ‘We tell them about the invitations, Fenton’s little peroration, and his final act.’

  Proudfoot looked up from the chaise longue. ‘But surely we don’t have to mention his accusations, do we?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Hermione called out. ‘The very thought …’

  Langham stared her down. ‘We tell them everything,’ he said. ‘None of you,’ he went on, looking around the group, ‘did anything wrong. The police need to know the facts of the case so they can establish that Fenton was of unsound mind.’

  Hermione muttered something to herself and gulped down her brandy.

  Fifteen minutes later, the ambulance arrived, followed by a police car carrying a detective sergeant, a forensic surgeon and a uniformed constable. Dr Bryce introduced himself as the dead man’s physician and formally identified the corpse as that of Maxwell Falwell Fenton. He was the first to be questioned by a plainclothes officer who introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Riley.

  The interviews were completed in just under two hours; each of the seven individuals present gave their names and addresses and their version of events and were told that in the course of police investigations there might well be further interviews.

  When his turn came, Langham reported the premature departure of the butler just minutes after the shooting.

  Riley thought about it and said, ‘The butler probably got the wind up at the sight of the blood.’ He leafed through his notes. ‘He was in the room, I take it?’

  ‘No, there were just the seven of us present, other than Fenton himself.’

  The detective shrugged. ‘Maybe the butler poked his head in at the sound of the gunshot, didn’t like what he saw and scarpered. That’ll be all for now, Mr Langham.’

  It was almost ten o’clock by the time the guests were granted permission to leave the house.

  Langham and Maria were the last to depart, following Holly Beckwith into the hall. The actress was belting her raincoat when the door from the library opened and two ambulancemen emerged bearing a stretcher.

  Langham and Maria stood back to allow them to pass. As they did so, the dead man’s arm slipped from beneath the covering sheet and dropped over the side of the stretcher.

  The actress gasped and pressed her fingers to her lips, staring at the hand in horror.

  Maria moved to comfort her, and Langham led the way out into the driving rain.

  FIVE

  At noon the following day, Maria jumped from the bus and hurried along the King’s Road, opening her umbrella and leaning into the headwind. The sound of spattering raindrops was loud on the brolly’s nylon dome and the wind was freezing.

  She was cheered by the thought of a cottage in the country, from which she could work instead of having to endure the travails of life in grimy London. She would come in perhaps once a week to collect manuscripts or to meet authors, and the rest of the time she would work before the open fire, with Donald tapping away on his next thriller in his own book-lined study. In between times, they would go for long walks in the country, spend evenings listening to the wireless or reading, or nip around the corner for a drink at the Green Man. Donald had said that he might even join the village cricket team, and had promised to think about buying a dog.

  Then, as she hurried along the street towards the restaurant where she was to meet Pamela, these pleasant daydreams were usurped by images from the previous evening.

  She had screwed her eyes shut when the man had lifted the revolver to his head and pulled the trigger, but what would live in her memory for a long time were the sounds that ensued: the detonation of the gunshot, followed by Holly Beckwith’s scream, Hermione Goudge’s moan, and exclamations from the men. She had opened her eyes briefly to see Fenton slumped in the chair, then had turned away. Perhaps in a bid to spare her from what followed, Donald had asked her to locate the butler while he took charge of the situation.

  Even worse than the sounds and images, however, were the memories that the artist’s suicide had brought to the surface of her mind, and which she thought she had long since erased.

  Memories. And guilt.

  She came to La Maison Blanche, lowered her brolly and shook the rain from it, and pushed through the door. Pamela was seated at a window table and waved as a waiter took Maria’s umbrella and coat.

  She had first met Pamela Baker at Charles’s garden party in August and had immediately taken to the young woman. She was intelligent and possessed a quirky sense of humour that was endearing. Maria had suggested they should meet for lunch, and they had found so much to talk about that they decided to meet more regularly.

  Maria squeezed Pamela’s hand across the table and slipped into her seat.

  ‘Thank you,’ Pamela said when they had placed their orders of French onion soup.

  ‘Thank you?’ Maria said. ‘For what?’

  ‘For making me ask Donald.’

  ‘Ah, oui,’ Maria said, laughing. ‘But I hardly made you.’

  ‘Well, you certainly convinced me that he wouldn’t bite my head off!’

  ‘Bite your head off? But Donald is not a cannibal; he is the sweetest of men.’

  ‘I know he is; even so, I was a bit scared. I couldn’t have asked Ralph.’

  Maria cocked her head. ‘And why not?’

  Pamela leaned back, pulling a face, as the waiter delivered their soup.

  ‘Because … Ralph can be a bit abrupt now and again.’

  ‘That’s just his manner, Pamela. He likes to put on a show of brusqueness, a kind of disregard or lack of concern, until you get to know him.’ Maria spread a napkin on her lap and nibbled at a crouton.

  ‘They’re an odd couple in every way, aren’t they?’ Pamela said. ‘They look so different – Donald is tall and handsome, Ralph small and …’ She faltered.

  Maria smiled. ‘Ugly?’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t do himself any favours, does he? With his threadbare suit, straggly tash and thinning ginger hair.’

  ‘They’re certainly a paradoxical pair. You’re right – they are different in every way. Intellectually, politically, temperamentally. Perhaps that’s why they make such a good team. That and what happened during the war.’

  Pamela spooned her soup. ‘What did happen?’

  ‘They were in Madagascar. Ralph was pinned down by gu
nfire, and a Vichy French soldier was about to shoot him, but Donald … he shot the Frenchman dead and saved Ralph’s life.’

  Pamela was wide-eyed. ‘Golly. I didn’t even know we were fighting the French!’

  ‘So they are very close – you could say almost like brothers,’ Maria said. ‘It must create a bond, when you go through something like that together.’

  Pamela ate her soup in silence for a while, then surprised Maria by saying, ‘Did he sweep you off your feet, Maria? Was it love at first sight?’

  Maria laughed. ‘Certainly not, to both questions. For the first few years that I knew him, I thought that Donald was – what is the phrase? – a stuffed shirt.’

  Pamela covered her mouth and laughed. ‘No! But why?’

  ‘Because he was so English and reserved! He would come into the agency every couple of months, as shy as a schoolboy, stammer a few non sequiturs about the weather, then hurry off into Charles’s inner sanctum as if eager to get away from me.’

  Pamela shook her head in disbelief. ‘But what happened? How did you end up married? I want to know all the details!’

  Maria laughed. ‘What happened? One day Donald staggered into the agency with a bleeding head wound—’

  Pamela stared at her. ‘What!’

  ‘It’s a long story … Donald was attacked by a criminal but managed to get back to the agency and stagger through the door … Well, not long after that, I knew I had to take him in hand and make him love me. So I did. And let me tell you, it was hard work breaking down that diffident English armour. I think it took me more than six months before he finally consented to sweep me off my feet!’

  Pamela was silent for a while. ‘Love is strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘Life is strange and love is even stranger.’

  ‘Is that a line of poetry?’

  Maria smiled and shook her head. ‘It’s from a short story Donald wrote for me, not long after we were engaged.’

  ‘He wrote you a story? How romantic!’

  Maria smiled. ‘It was a lovely gesture, and I’ve always remembered that line. The hero says it to his lover as he goes off to war. And doesn’t come back.’