The Crime and the Crystal

by E. X. Ferrars

  “Oh, it’s you!” he exclaimed when he saw Sam. “Thank God! I thought it was the press back again. I was all ready to tell them to go to hell.”

  His normally neat, oval face was strained and haggard. His eyelids were red and swollen, as if he had wept. When he showed his teeth in what the day before had seemed a pleasant if rather expressionless smile, they gave his face the grinning look of a skull. The brown hair that was receding from his forehead stood up in dishevelled strands, as if it had not been combed that day.

  “I wasn’t going to talk to any bloody journalist again,” he said. “Enough is enough. Nice of you to come, Sam. D’you know where Jan is? She’s vanished.”

  “She’s with the police,” Sam said. “She and Tony. You needn’t worry about them. Look, we brought these for you.” He gestured at the bottles that he and Andrew were carrying. “Happened to be passing Calthorpe’s and one or two other places, so we thought we might as well stock in a bit for you.”

  “I see. Thanks. Nice of you to think of it.” There was a confused look in Denis’s eyes and he did not seem really to take in what Sam had said. “Come in. But where’s Jan been?”

  Sam stepped into the house and Andrew followed him.

  “She came to me,” Sam said, “and the police came after her. But she doesn’t know anything. She didn’t see anything. She came out of the bedroom where she’d been changing and found Kay dead and panicked and drove straight up to Hartwell. Silliest thing she could have done, with the police still trying to pin Luke’s murder on her, or so she believes. I’m not sure if she’s right about that, and I’m sick and tired of hearing about it by now. Sometimes I wish I’d murdered the bastard myself, it would have saved a lot of trouble. I often felt like doing it when she told me how he was treating her. I know he’d looks and charm and money and all that, but if ever there was a brute who deserved getting murdered, it was Luke Wilding.”

  “Talking of money…” Denis began and stopped.

  Sam had put the bottles down on the floor of the hall and Andrew had put his load down beside them.

  “Well, at least that’s something you don’t have to worry about,” Sam said. “Kay’s death can’t make any difference to you there. No one can say you murdered her for her money.”

  “No, but still it’s very strange…” Denis began again and once more stopped. Then he went on, “Come into the lounge. Everything’s in a mess since those men were here, but we can sit down. D’you feel like a beer?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Sam said. “What about you, Andrew?”

  “Thank you, yes,” Andrew answered.

  Denis led the way into the living room, which the day before Andrew had thought very charming. It was in disorder now. The powder that the fingerprint men had used left a grey film on all the polished surfaces, and the bloodstained hearthrug and the crystal that had killed Kay had been removed. It was desolate and in spite of the warmth of the evening seemed to have a chill in it. Denis left them for a few minutes, returning with glasses of beer on a tray. As he handed one to Andrew he seemed for the first time to become aware of his presence.

  “This isn’t what you came to Australia for,” he said with a strained attempt at a smile. “I suppose you’ll be making for home soon instead of staying on.”

  “I haven’t thought about it yet,” Andrew answered and realized with some surprise that this was true. He had wondered if he was more of a burden or a help to Tony and whether or not it might be best for him to move to a hotel, but it had not occurred to him to return to England yet. He began to wonder now if it was really what he ought to do.

  “You were saying something about money, Denis,” Sam said. He had sat down in an armchair, stretching out his thin, hairy legs with one ankle crossed over the other. “What’s the problem?”

  “It’s only that Vaughan, our lawyer, was out here today,” Denis said, standing where the hearthrug had been and leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece. “I thought it was best to get in touch with him and tell him what had happened, and he came out here and told me—not that it’s important, but it’s odd—he told me he doesn’t know anything about what Kay did with her money, or where it came from. And nor do the people at our bank. He’s got her will. We both made wills after we got married and left everything we had to one another, and that’s quite straightforward, but he hasn’t any share certificates or records of where her money came from or where she kept it. That doesn’t seem important now, but I suppose we’ll have to get it sorted out sooner or later for probate. It’s just an additional little worry.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sam said. “She hadn’t any money. Not that I knew of.”

  “She had,” Denis said. “I don’t know how much, but she certainly had money of her own. Investments, I always supposed, she’d inherited from her mother. I never questioned her about them, because I knew she liked to handle them herself, but she had enough to buy her own clothes and keep us in luxuries I couldn’t have afforded on my salary.”

  “Her poor mother hadn’t a cent,” Sam said.

  “Could she have inherited it from someone else, then?” Denis asked. “Some aunt or uncle?”

  Sam shook his head. “We never went in for money in my family.”

  “It doesn’t matter now, anyway,” Denis said. “We’ll get it sorted out in time.”

  “Could she have been earning it on the quiet?” Andrew asked. “I once knew a woman who was married to the governor of some African country and she found she could make a very nice income writing romantic stories, well spiced with sex, for magazines at home. But she didn’t think they were what most people out there in those days would have thought the governor’s lady ought to be writing, so she gave herself a pseudonym, opened an account under that name in one of the banks there, and contributed handsomely to the family budget without her husband knowing anything about it. Could Kay have been doing anything like that?”

  “Kay never wrote a line in her life,” Sam said.

  “I really don’t think she did,” Denis agreed. “But perhaps you’ve hit on it, Andrew. I mean, that she was earning money somehow which for some reason she liked to keep secret.”

  As he spoke the sound of the front doorbell pealed through the house. Quietly, under his breath, Denis began to swear. Then the bell pealed again.

  “It’ll be that man Ross,” Denis muttered. “He said he’d be back again sometime. Let him go on ringing. I haven’t got to let him in.”

  “I think I would, if I were you,” Sam said. “No point in antagonizing these people. Shall I open the door for you?”

  Denis gave a deep sigh. “No, I’ll go.”

  He got up to go to the front door. Seeing him from the back, Andrew realized how weary the man was, how his shoulders had slumped, his spine sagged, and how his feet dragged on the ground, so that he looked twenty years older than he was. Andrew heard him open the front door, then give a startled exclamation.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Can I come in?” the very English voice of the Honourable Dudley Blair said. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

  “Have you got to do it now?” Denis asked. “I’ve had about all I can take. If you could do it some other time, Dud—”

  “No, no, at once, the sooner the better.” The young man’s voice sounded excited, almost frenzied, as if he were ready to make trouble if he were resisted. “I promise I’ll keep it short. It won’t take long. But I’ve got to tell you about it.”

  “All right, then, come in.”

  Andrew heard the door close, then saw Dudley Blair appear in the doorway of the living room. He was in his usual rags, his feet were bare and his toenails were painted. There was a curious animation in his eyes and his cheeks were flushed.

  “You see, it’s all my fault,” he said in a loud, aggressive voice. “I’ve got to confess to someone.”

  He collided with the doorpost as he said it, then subsided gently, all six foot three of him, on
to the floor.

  Chapter Six

  “He’s drunk,” Sam said.

  “I’m not sure he is.” Andrew got up and stooped over the young man. He remembered a student who had once come aggressively into his room to argue with him about something, then had quietly collapsed, just as Dudley Blair had done. “I think it may be something else.”

  “Then hadn’t we better get a doctor?” Denis said.

  “If I’m right, it might be better not to,” Andrew said. “It might only make trouble for him. I don’t think he’s actually unconscious, you know.”

  “What do you think is the matter with him?” Sam asked.

  “Pot,” Andrew said. “Hashish. Cannabis. Whatever you like to call it. A slight overdose.”

  His guess was based partly on what Jan and Tony had told him about Dudley.

  “What ought we to do about it?” Denis asked. “We can’t leave him just lying there.”

  “I believe strong coffee is as good as anything,” Andrew said.

  “I’ll make some,” Denis said and disappeared to the kitchen.

  “Let’s get him up on to the settee,” Sam said.

  Between them he and Andrew lifted the young man, whose long, thin body was very light. They put him down on the sofa and put a cushion under his head. He groaned as they were doing it, opened his eyes and muttered something like a protest, then closed them again and lay limply where they had put him.

  “These kids,” Sam said. “What fools they are. I wonder where he gets it. Do you think he meant what he said?”

  “That he wanted to confess to the murder?”

  “That’s what it sounded like, didn’t it?”

  “I don’t think it would be surprising if he’s had second thoughts about that by the time he comes round,” Andrew said. “On the other hand, it may have been something else he wanted to confess, which he may tell us about presently.”

  “Jan’s fond of him,” Sam said. “She’s told me about him. She’s sorry for him and she’s kept trying to help him. My own idea is it’s time someone told him to get down to a plain job of work.”

  Andrew did not think that the matter was as simple as that. He had met other Dudley Blairs during his working life, had been sorry for them, irritated by them and defeated by them, and he had never come even close to making up his mind what ought to be done with them.

  By the time Denis returned with the coffee, Dudley was certainly conscious. He had shifted his position on the sofa, drawing his long legs up so that his feet did not protrude beyond the end of it and giving a sudden violent shiver as if the shock of returning to the normal world were almost too painful to be borne. His eyes were still closed, but when the coffee was brought he opened them again and observed in his well-bred voice, “This is terribly good of you.”

  “Better sit up,” Sam said and put his hands out to haul the young man into a sitting posture, but he attained that himself without help. Denis poured out a cup of coffee and brought it to him and seemed prepared to hold it to his lips, but Dudley took the cup from him and held it only a little shakily to his lips.

  “Good,” he said. “Very good. I’m so sorry this happened. Not what I intended at all. I never dreamt it would. I didn’t mean to be any trouble to anyone.”

  All the aggressiveness had gone.

  “Has it never happened to you before?” Andrew asked.

  “Well, yes, once or twice. But of course one’s never expecting it when it comes. It always takes one by surprise. Everything seems so wonderfully clear and simple beforehand. And I knew it was important to come and see Denis, but it would have been better if I’d put it off for a time, wouldn’t it?”

  “Why did you come to see me?” Denis asked.

  Dudley’s forehead wrinkled in a puzzled frown. “Yes, why did I? I expect I’ll remember in a moment. This coffee is very good.”

  “Have some more.” Denis refilled his cup.

  “Thank you,” Dudley said. “It’s terribly good of you. But I’m really sorry to be so much trouble.”

  “Never mind about that.” Denis had drawn a chair up beside the sofa and sat down close to it, his gaze fixed intently on Dudley’s face. “You said you’d got to confess to someone. You also said it was your fault. What were you talking about? Kay’s death?”

  “Well, I was and I wasn’t. I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you want to know. I’m pretty sure I didn’t. It’s all a bit hazy at the moment, but no, I’m sure I didn’t. But I feel I’m to blame for it.”

  “For God’s sake, what are you talking about?” Denis asked impatiently. “Can’t you say what you mean?”

  “I don’t think it’s much good trying to hurry him,” Andrew said. “He’ll tell you all about it soon.”

  “Yes, of course,” Dudley said, “only it’s confusing. There are so many things to tell. I’ve spent most of the day with the police—that’s one thing I want to tell you about. Then there’s the business of the tall man I saw when I was jogging—that’s another. And then there’s the thing I specially wanted to tell you…” He frowned again with the effort of concentration. “You see, I told Jan where I’d been getting my pot. I shouldn’t have done that, but d’you know, it didn’t occur to me she didn’t know all about it. I mean, working in the place herself, you’d have thought she’d have been bound to know. But she didn’t. It was a great shock to her. And she said she’d have to think over what she ought to do. And what she did was talk it over with Kay and that’s how all the trouble started.”

  “Just a minute,” Denis said. “You say you’ve been getting your drugs from the shop where Jan works.”

  “That’s it.”

  “In other words, you’ve been getting them from Sara Massingham.”

  Dudley gave a reluctant nod of his head. “Yes.”

  “How did you pay her?” Denis asked. “Isn’t it an expensive hobby?”

  “I didn’t pay her,” Dudley said. “I’d just take along some of my stuff from time to time—my jewellery, you know—and she wouldn’t pay me, she’d just hand over a few joints, not many, because my stuff isn’t really worth much, but she liked it and generally managed to sell it quite profitably. And of course I thought Jan knew all about it, but the poor girl was really upset. I tried to tell her it was nothing so very dreadful, not like heroin or cocaine, but she wouldn’t listen, and I was afraid she was going to go straight to the police with what I’d told her, but instead she told me next day she’d talked it over with Kay and Kay had told her to leave the matter to her.”

  “She always talked everything over with Kay,” Sam said. “That at least sounds true.”

  “It’s all true, everything I’ve said,” Dudley said.

  “Where’s Sara been getting the stuff from?” Denis asked. “Do you know that?”

  “Her brother’s skipper of a ship that trades in Indonesia,” Dudley answered. “I think he’d been bringing it in.”

  “How much of this have you told the police?”

  Dudley gave a deep sigh. “All of it. They came and picked me up because someone had told them I’d been given a green towel by Jan, and they’d found one just like it with bloodstains on the beach. I don’t know how they found out about my having one, but they knew all about it. It rather puzzled me.”

  “I told them,” Andrew said. “If you remember, I was there when you came to the Gardiners’ house and picked it up.”

  “Yes—yes, I remember now. I hadn’t thought of that. Actually I was able to show them that I still had the towel and that it hadn’t any bloodstains on it. But I’ve been in trouble with them before, you see, about pot. Nothing serious. They picked several of us up at a party and lectured us and let us go. But this time they’d got it into their heads Kay’s death might somehow be connected with the drugs racket and kept on at me till I told them everything I knew.”

  “And you think yourself Kay’s death may really have been connected with it?” Andrew said.

  Dudley squirmed slightly fr
om embarrassment on the sofa.

  “It does look like it, doesn’t it?” he said.

  “But what did she do to make herself immediately so dangerous to someone that she had to be killed?”

  “I don’t like to tell you what I think.”

  “Go on,” Denis said savagely. “You’ve said enough already. Tell us the rest of it.”

  “It’s just that it seemed to me possible that she’d threatened Sara somehow,” Dudley said, “and Sara had told her brother, or whoever else she was working with, and they did the job.”

  “My God, you’re saying Kay tried to blackmail Sara!” Denis’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper, yet it sounded far more dangerous than his explosion of the moment before. He looked as if he were having trouble keeping his hands to himself instead of fastening them round the thin neck of the young man. “Isn’t that what you’re leading up to?”

  Dudley turned his head on the cushion so that he did not have to meet Denis’s eyes. “It might not have been blackmail, you know,” he said. “She may simply have threatened to go to the police. Isn’t that much more likely?”

  Andrew was not sure that it was. From the time that Denis had spoken of Kay’s mysterious income he had wondered uneasily, in spite of the feeling that the explanation was too melodramatic, if blackmail might not have been the source of it. The thought would probably never have occurred to him if Sam had not told him that she was greedy, ambitious and unscrupulous. Indeed, it would have seemed fantastic. Until murder had invaded the scene here there had been an air of quietly smart respectability about the Lightfoots and their home that would have made such a thing seem preposterous. But mysterious incomes, apparently paid in this instance in cash, since neither her husband, her lawyer nor her bank had any record of it, have to come from somewhere, which made blackmail a possibility which perhaps ought to be considered.

  But there was something about this that did not fit. It was only a few days since Kay had heard of Sara Massingham’s connection with the distribution of drugs, yet, as he understood what Denis had said about it, Kay had had an income of her own at least since the time that they were married.