Murder by Numbers

by Eric Brown

  ‘Mr Smith booked one of your acts,’ Ralph said. ‘According to Miss Mankowitz, this was a fortnight ago. We’d like to know the identity of the person he booked.’

  ‘He’s not in trouble?’

  ‘No, but we’re investigating the suicide of Mr Smith, so we’d obviously like to speak to anyone who had dealings with him.’

  The phone rang and Mr Kersh snatched it up and listened. ‘I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. No, that’s impossible. Klaxo the Clown is dead. You didn’t hear? Heart attack, the last act at the Brighton Hippodrome. Tragic. We’re all in mourning here. Sadly missed. A rare talent … A terrible, terrible business. Goodbye.’

  He blinked at Ralph. ‘The name again?’

  ‘Smith.’

  Mr Kersh propelled his swivel chair over to a filing cabinet and pulled open a drawer. His fat fingers marched down a wad of dog-eared files. He pulled one out and examined a typewritten list, his lips moving as he read.

  ‘Here we are. Smith, Winterfield. Booked one of my best, Edgar Benedict.’

  ‘An actor?’ Langham asked.

  Mr Kersh’s bushy eyebrows leapt high above his round glasses. ‘An actor, he asks! A star! Worked alongside the finest – Olivier and Gielgud and all the big names. Though, granted, this was before the war. He’s knocking on now – in his seventies.’

  ‘Fallen on hard times?’ Langham suggested.

  ‘Perhaps lean times would be a better description,’ Kersh said.

  ‘Do you know why Mr Smith hired him?’ Ralph asked.

  Kersh read the notes and shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not, my friends. But he paid well – thirty guineas. My guess is a soliloquy, or maybe a reading at some country house soirée.’

  ‘We’d like Mr Benedict’s address,’ Langham said.

  Kersh pushed himself over to a second filing cabinet and pulled out a heavy drawer. He found a file and opened it on the desk, then copied out the address in small, neat handwriting and passed the slip of paper to Langham.

  ‘Twelve Laburnum Grove, Forest Hill,’ he read.

  ‘And Mr Benedict didn’t say anything about the booking, when it might’ve been for?’ Ralph asked.

  ‘Not a dicky bird, but then I haven’t seen Edgar for a while. He’s not as well as he was. His glory days, I’m afraid, are behind him. But what glory days! He even acted in Hollywood, you know?’

  The phone shrilled again and he snatched it up. Langham quickly thanked him and gestured to the door.

  Mr Kersh waved as they slipped from the office. ‘The Amazing Mr Waldo is available and his rates are very reasonable, my friend.’

  They left the office and made their way back to the car. ‘How about we go and see this Mr Benedict, Ralph, then call it a day, and I’ll drop you at home?’

  As they drove from Holborn and headed south, Ralph asked, ‘How’s Maria taking it?’

  Langham tapped the steering wheel, considering. ‘She’s bearing up, all things considered. At least she’s safe at Pamela’s.’

  The traffic was abnormally light for a Friday afternoon. Langham kept his distance behind an overloaded coal lorry and considered taking Maria out for a meal. A nice red wine at a quiet Italian place would be the perfect way to wind down after a busy day.

  ‘How well did she know this Fenton chappie?’ Ralph asked, slipping down in the passenger seat and lighting up a Capstan.

  ‘Well, I think she was smitten. She was only eighteen at the time, and Fenton was a big name in the art world.’

  Ralph glanced at him. ‘They weren’t …?’

  ‘Lovers?’ Langham laughed. ‘No, of course not. As I said, she was young. A kid. Fenton painted her.’

  Ralph blew out a plume of smoke. ‘You never said why Fenton had her on his hit list, Don.’

  Langham recounted Maxwell Fenton’s behaviour at Winterfield all those years ago, and Maria’s response with the fire iron.

  ‘And he harboured a grudge ever since?’ Ralph said. ‘Enough to want her killed?’ He shrugged. ‘Sounds a bit of an overreaction to me.’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t in his right mind towards the end.’

  Ralph grunted. ‘The bastard’s better off dead, if you ask me,’ he said. He was silent for a while as they motored south-east through the suburbs. ‘I’ve been mulling it over.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘This Edgar Benedict chap. Fenton hired him, right? But Mr Kersh couldn’t say for what. Presumably some acting work.’

  ‘That’s the favourite.’

  ‘But – this is a long shot – what if it was this Benedict fellow he got to do his dirty work?’

  Langham shook his head. ‘So he rings up Mr Kersh and hires the actor Edgar Benedict to kill half a dozen innocent people? It’s a theatrical agency, Ralph, not a hiring house for hitmen.’

  ‘I know, I know. But what if he had something on the actor?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What if he was blackmailing him?’

  ‘What on earth makes you think …?’

  Ralph pointed a nicotine-stained finger at him. ‘Remember those bank statements we found at Winterfield? The twenty-five nicker going into Fenton’s account every month? So what if the dosh was from the actor, to keep Fenton silent about something?’

  ‘It’s a theory,’ Langham allowed, ‘but a very tentative one.’

  ‘And how about,’ Ralph went on, ‘Fenton then put the pressure on the actor? Stopped demanding cash and wanted something more from him. Perhaps what he had on the actor was enough for Fenton to force him into killing these people?’

  Langham glanced at his partner. ‘You really think that?’

  Ralph gazed through the windscreen for a while, then shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. What would make Benedict kill these people when the bloke who’s blackmailing him is dead?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Langham said. ‘We might find out more when we talk to Edgar Benedict.’

  Laburnum Grove was an affluent, leafy suburban street lined with red-brick semi-detached villas dating from the nineteenth century. They found number twelve and parked outside. An orange light burned at a downstairs window, cosy in the gathering twilight.

  They left the car and stood under the small portico before the front door as rain began to fall. Evidently the house had been divided into flats; four bell-pushes were labelled with the occupants’ names.

  Langham pushed Benedict’s and waited.

  Ralph sniffed. ‘I expected something a bit posher from an ex-Hollywood thesp.’

  ‘Kersh did say he’d fallen on lean times.’

  ‘Probably explains why he accepted acting work from Fenton,’ Ralph said, adding, ‘or maybe he decided to become a hitman in his old age?’

  ‘Can it.’ Langham laughed, pressing the bell again.

  A lace curtain in the bow window twitched aside, then fell back into place. Through the door’s stained-glass window, Langham made out a vague shape advancing down the hallway.

  The door opened and a blue-rinsed matron regarded them through half-moon glasses. Ralph was ready with his accreditation, which he hung before the woman’s startled gaze.

  ‘Private detectives?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘We’d like a word with Mr Edgar Benedict,’ Ralph said.

  ‘I am afraid Mr Benedict is away at the moment.’

  ‘Do you know when he might be back, Mrs …?’

  ‘Miss,’ she corrected. ‘Miss Wardley. As to Mr Benedict’s return, I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly say. He is an actor, you see, and he’s liable to go away at short notice and for indefinite periods.’

  ‘You know him well?’ Ralph asked.

  ‘Mr Benedict has been renting a room from me since the end of the war,’ she said. Then plucked up the courage to ask, ‘I wonder if you would mind telling me what this might be about? Mr Benedict isn’t in any kind of trouble, is he?’

  ‘He’s in no trouble at all,’ Langham reassured her. ‘We’d merely like to speak to Mr Benedict in relation to someone whose
movements we’re investigating.’

  The landlady looked relieved. ‘As I said, Mr Benedict is not currently at home—’

  ‘I take it you have the key to his room?’ Ralph said, peering past her into the hall. ‘We’d like to take a look.’

  ‘Well …’ Miss Wardley lifted an uncertain hand to her wattled throat.

  ‘We wouldn’t be long,’ Langham said, smiling at her, ‘and you can accompany us.’

  ‘In that case, very well,’ she relented, and led them into the house and up two flights of stairs.

  ‘Mr Benedict has rooms in the attic,’ Miss Wardley explained as they climbed. ‘He has a little sitting room up there, as well as a bedroom. It’s all very self-contained.’

  ‘How long has he been away?’ Langham asked.

  ‘That would be almost a week,’ she replied. ‘He left last Saturday.’

  They came to a landing and paused outside a door. ‘And he hasn’t been back since then?’

  ‘He hasn’t,’ she said.

  ‘Did Mr Benedict mention where he was going? Does the name Winterfield in Essex ring a bell?’

  ‘I’m afraid he didn’t mention his destination, and I don’t recall him mentioning Essex. For all that I have known Mr Benedict for over ten years,’ she said, ‘he is very reserved and hardly ever vouchsafes anything of a personal nature. You might say he’s the perfect gentleman.’

  ‘He’s secretive, eh?’ Ralph suggested.

  The landlady pursed her lips. ‘I would prefer to use the term “discreet”.’

  She moved to the door and unlocked it, showing them into a spacious area under the sloping roof. The sitting room was furnished with a chintz-covered sofa and armchairs drawn up to a small gas fire, next to which stood a bulky radiogram. Black-and-white photographs adorned the walls, visual mementoes of a lifetime treading the boards.

  Langham moved around the room, admiring the photographs. They showed the same young man in a variety of stage roles – and one or two obviously taken while on film sets – as well as signed pictures of well-known stars. One photograph showed Benedict on the beach in his early twenties with his arms around another beaming, bare-chested young man.

  Langham turned to the landlady, who was smiling with fondness at the photographs. ‘I take it that Mr Benedict wasn’t married?’

  She blinked. ‘Whatever makes you think that? In actual fact, he was married. Four times.’

  Ralph laughed. ‘A bit of a lad, eh?’

  Miss Wardley blushed. ‘I’ll have you know that Mr Benedict had the tragic misfortune of losing two of his wives to premature deaths.’

  ‘But he’s single now, I take it?’ Langham asked.

  ‘His last wife passed away in ’forty-five, just before he moved in here. As far as I know, he has had no liaisons since then. But, as I mentioned, he does not speak much of his personal affairs.’

  ‘Children?’ Ralph asked.

  Miss Wardley shook her head. ‘One of his greatest regrets,’ she said, ‘is that he never fathered a son or daughter. His first wife died in childbirth, and his second just months after they married. In many ways, gentlemen, Mr Benedict leads a quietly tragic life.’

  Langham turned to the photographs and smiled sadly to himself, repeating a quietly tragic life … How terribly descriptive, and just the kind of phrase a spinster like Miss Wardley would use.

  ‘And yet very fulfilled,’ he said, gesturing to the gallery, ‘going by these?’

  ‘Fulfilled? I’m not at all sure that Mr Benedict would describe his career in that way,’ she said. ‘Oh, he had many roles in his early years, but he never had leading parts or long runs on the stage. He was, I think the phrase goes, a jobbing actor. And latterly the parts had dried up somewhat. He was hired occasionally for radio plays, but I think he secretly craved to be back on the stage.’

  ‘Don,’ Ralph said from across the room, ‘come here and take a gander.’

  Langham ducked under a sloping beam. Ralph pointed to a black-and-white photograph showing a group of men and women posed in the sunlight before a country house.

  He noticed two things almost simultaneously. The first was that the house was unmistakably Winterfield – with its crabbed mullioned windows and twisted, turreted chimneys – and the second was that one of the young women in the picture was Maria.

  Ralph glanced at him. ‘It is Maria, isn’t it? And the house: Winterfield, right?’

  Langham nodded. ‘Yes, to both.’

  He stared at the young girl his wife had been, laughing out at the camera. She was standing next to a tall, slim older man who had a hand placed, almost possessively, on her shoulder. The intimacy exhibited by the pair made him feel more than a little uneasy.

  Ralph pointed. ‘Fenton, right?’

  Langham stared at the tall, good-looking, dark-haired man standing beside Maria. ‘It must be. He’s dressed for the part in a paint-smeared artist’s smock.’ He contrasted the full-faced, handsome Maxwell Fenton depicted here with the aged wreck who had taken his own life just two days ago.

  ‘And this chap here’ – Ralph indicated a tall man in his mid-fifties, familiar from the other photographs, garbed in tennis whites and standing on the other side of the artist – ‘must be Edgar Benedict.’

  ‘So Benedict was a guest at the soirées down at Winterfield in the thirties,’ Langham murmured.

  Ralph scratched his head. ‘I don’t geddit, Don. He knew Fenton, right? Look, he has an arm around the artist’s shoulders. They were friends. And yet when Fenton hires him via the agency to come down to Winterfield, he uses the name Mr Smith.’

  Langham shook his head. ‘Why? Why would he do that? Why not just use his own name? And why go through the agency to contact his old friend?’

  He unhooked the photograph from the wall and turned to the landlady. He indicated Benedict and Fenton standing side by side. ‘I don’t suppose Mr Benedict ever mentioned the artist Maxwell Fenton, did he?’

  Miss Wardley took the photograph and stared at it, frowning.

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes. Yes, he did. In fact …’ She moved to the bedroom door. ‘I don’t suppose Mr Benedict would mind my showing you this.’

  She ushered them into the small bedroom under the eaves and pointed to an oil painting hanging over the single bed. It depicted a beautiful auburn-haired woman reclining on a chaise longue, her bare arms extended above her head as she smiled insouciantly at the artist.

  ‘Mr Benedict’s second wife, Amelia Carswell, the actress. Mr Benedict told me that Amelia passed away just months after this was painted. A brain haemorrhage, I believe. She was just twenty-eight. And the artist was Maxwell Fenton.’

  Langham moved closer to the oil and peered at the bottom right corner and the signature Max Fenton, ’37.

  He stood back and admired the painting, recalling Hermione Goudge’s withering assessment of Fenton’s canvases as ‘daubs’. He didn’t profess to be an expert, but the painting of Amelia Carswell seemed more than just technically accomplished: the way he had depicted the woman’s playful demeanour, the ray of sunlight slanting through the window, was little short of brilliant.

  ‘Do you know if Mr Benedict and Maxwell Fenton met recently?’

  ‘I really don’t know. If they did, then Mr Benedict didn’t mention it.’

  ‘And Fenton never visited Benedict here?’ Ralph asked.

  Miss Wardley shook her head. ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  They ducked out of the small bedroom and returned to the sitting room. Langham searched the photographs of Edgar Benedict for the most recent, and found one depicting the actor with silvered sideburns and wrinkles around his eyes. He appeared to be in his late fifties.

  He indicated the photograph and the group scene taken outside Winterfield. ‘Would you mind terribly if we borrowed these? I promise I’ll return them just as soon as we’ve completed the investigation.’

  Miss Wardley appeared unsure but relented. ‘Very well, yes. But what should I tell Mr Bene
dict when he returns?’

  Langham removed the photographs from their frames and slipped them into his pocket, then gave the landlady a calling card. ‘If you would be good enough to give him this, and tell him it’s vitally important that he contact us when he returns, I’d appreciate it enormously.’

  Miss Wardley took the card and stared at it, nodding her agreement.

  She led them back downstairs to the hallway, and they thanked her and left the house, hurrying through the rain to the car.

  Ralph sat in meditative silence as Langham drove through the quiet streets towards Lewisham, then said, ‘OK, listen to this.’

  Langham glanced at his partner. ‘You’ve revised your earlier theory, right?’

  Ralph grinned. ‘How’d you guess?’

  ‘I can read your mind as if it were a book.’

  ‘Go on, then. What am I thinking?’

  ‘Your earlier hypothesis, about Fenton blackmailing Benedict to do his dirty work. You now think blackmail might’ve had nothing to do with it. You’re thinking that Benedict, as a friend, was all too willing to help Fenton out.’

  ‘Well, something like that,’ Ralph said. ‘What about it, Don?’

  Langham shook his head. ‘I don’t buy it.’

  ‘Not even as a long shot?’

  ‘Not even then. You’d have to be a ruddy great friend in order to agree to kill half a dozen innocent men and women. And even if he had a personal reason to hate these people – and we’ve no evidence to make us think that Benedict did – it’s highly unlikely that a quiet, reserved thespian would suddenly become a mass murderer at the behest of an old friend.’

  ‘Well, put like that … But we don’t rule it out, OK?’

  ‘We don’t rule it out,’ Langham agreed. ‘But there’s another thing. As I said earlier, if Fenton did want Benedict to do his killing after his death, why did he use the Mr Smith moniker and go through the agency?’

  Ralph swore. ‘It doesn’t stack up.’

  ‘There’s something about the whole business that doesn’t stack up.’

  They reached Lewisham and drove down the long street of modern terraced houses where Ralph lived, pulling up outside number eighty-eight.

  ‘Right,’ Ralph said, ‘what about tomorrow?’