He worked till midnight that day, with powdered graphite, insufflator and magnifying lens. He tested first the pages containing the libellous passages, which yielded him, amidst many blurred, indecipherable prints, a few he could identify as General Thoresby’s, Stephen Protheroe’s, Basil Ryle’s and the compositor’s. He worked all Friday, till tea-time, at the thankless task, thinking sourly that this was the sort of routine job which ought to be done by the police. He had reached page 200 by 4 o’clock, and got nothing for his pains but a blinding headache and a conviction that he had a cold coming. He rang Clare Massinger.
‘It’s Nigel. I’m in a foul temper. Can I come to tea?’
‘All right. Buy a Madeira cake on the way, will you?’
Five minutes later he was in Clare’s studio. Gazing at a clay head on a stand, she did not look up for a few moments after he had entered: he had time to admire yet again the incredibly lustrous black hair that tumbled over her shoulders, the pale exquisite face in profile. Clare muttered malevolently at the head, then came over to Nigel.
‘I won’t kiss you,’ he said. ‘I think I’m getting a cold.’
‘I like your colds.’ Then, standing back from him, eyeing him with the same detached, concentrated look she gave her sitters, Clare said, ‘Yes, you do look rather disintegrated. I suppose you’ve been going about in wet socks again.’
‘Don’t be a scold.’
‘You’d better have two aspirins with your tea. And take some nose-drops in case your sinus starts playing up.’ She rummaged in a cupboard that appeared to be full of paint-rags, producing a small green bottle with a syringe in it. ‘No, not that way. Lie down on the divan, hang your head backwards over the edge like Desdemona after she’s suffocated, and squirt it up your nostrils. The stuff won’t get to your sinus unless you’re upside down. No! Not a whole syringeful—just a few drops. Why won’t you ever do things by halves?’
His head dangling over the divan’s edge, Nigel reflected that there are few more agreeable experiences than being bullied by a beautiful woman. Sitting up again, he told her so.
‘I’m not bullying,’ she said. ‘I just don’t want to have you on my hands moaning about oh your poor head.’
As Clare got the tea ready, Nigel looked round the studio. My home-from-home—and what a pigsty. I could never cohabit with a woman who keeps an open pot of foie gras on a shelf next to an open tin of turpentine. Cooking utensils, plaster casts, half-finished cigarettes, valuable books of reproductions, gobbets of clay were littered everywhere. A clay-stained overall hung on a hook beside a superb, violet-coloured Dior coat. A shelf running the length of one wall held a herd of those small, stylised clay horses, with hose-like muzzles, which Clare moulded almost automatically while her mind was at work on other things. On a pedestal in one corner stood her acknowledged masterpiece—the bronze head of a boy, peaky and perky, the lips shaped as if he was about to whistle a tune or utter some blistering and unprintable repartee. It was the head of the boy Foxy, who had come into their lives so unceremoniously sixteen months ago, during the events which had led up to a melodramatic scene in the Albert Hall.1
‘Foxy wears well.’
‘Yes. He dropped in to tea yesterday. Asked after the Guvnor. I told him you were busy detecting. Oh hell, I wish I could detect the cake-knife.’
‘It’s in the second drawer of your make-up table, in the bedroom.’
‘Is it? How did it get there? … Oh, you’re mocking me!’
Clare, who had been prowling the studio in search of the cake-knife, swirled round, and accidentally jogged Nigel’s teacup out of his hand.
‘Oh damn it all, why am I so clumsy!’ she wailed, picking up the cup and mopping Nigel with the scarf she had taken off her neck.
‘You’re not. You’re extremely graceful. It’s just your impulsive nature coming out that makes you bump into things.’
After tea, Nigel lay on the divan with his head in Clare’s lap. Her fingers stroked and moulded his temples: he felt like a piece of clay being brought to life. Her hands were square, stubby-fingered, strong but also meltingly soft. Nigel kissed one of them.
‘They’re ugly, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘That’s why I take so much trouble over them.’
‘I wish I was ugly, then.’
‘Oh, you are. Hideous. In an interesting way. Your face is lopsided. But symmetry is boring. Do you feel better now?’
‘Much better.’
‘Sometime I wonder why I don’t marry you,’ said Clare dreamily. ‘At any rate, it’s not for want of not being asked.’
‘Or not asking.’
‘Well, will you?’
‘I couldn’t live in this sort of chaos, darling Clare. I should go mad.’
Her dark eyes widened. ‘But I’m not asking you to cohabit with me. I don’t think that would suit me at all. I wouldn’t want you about the place all the time, tidying things up. I said “marrry”. You see, I like my chaos.’
‘Chaos is a necessary condition of creation for you?’
Clare nodded, and the coal-black hair danced over his face. ‘Pompous old basket,’ she lovingly murmured.
‘Shall I tell you all about my case?’ said Nigel presently.
‘I should like that very much.’
Nigel removed himself to an armchair, and having shifted from its seat a large ammonite, an ashtray and a half-eaten bun, sat down. He then told her, in very considerable detail, about the libel affair at Wenham & Geraldine’s. Clare listened intently, curled up like a cat on the divan, her eyes regarding him unwinkingly, like a cat’s.
‘Well, I call that very interesting, in a quiet way,’ she said when he had finished. ‘I don’t like the sound of that Basil Ryle much.’
Nigel glanced at her alertly. It was odd she should have picked out the suspect he had not mentioned to the other partners this morning.
‘I think he is riding for a fall,’ she continued.
‘Why?’
‘You say he’s in love with this Miles woman. I happen to know that she’s bitch-bitch number one.’
‘You know her?’
‘Know of. The Miles woman has one constant, enduring passion, one soul-mate—Millicent Miles. She will have been keeping this Ryle on a string. If he fails to get the firm to reprint her books, she will cut the string. If he succeeds, she’ll have got what she wants out of him, so she’ll let go of the string. Either way, he’s had it, you mark my words.’
‘Well I must say, Clare, sometimes you amaze me.’
‘What? Am I wrong?’
‘No, I’m sure you’re right.’
‘And this Ryle sounds to me an explosive character. I suppose he’s repressed and old-fashioned under his chromium plating, and nourishes rather shoddy-glamorous-chivalrous notions about sex and is half annoyed at himself for it?’
‘How long have you known him?’
‘Never met him in my life, or heard about him till you told me. Honestly.’
Nigel rose and started to pace the studio. ‘Suppose Millicent Miles has made it a condition of marrying or going to bed with him, that her books get reprinted. Protheroe is the main obstacle to this. So Ryle has an exceedingly strong motive for discrediting Protheroe, quite apart from his general feeling that Stephen’s a back-number—like Bates, the late Production Manager—and ought to get the push.’
‘Oh, I don’t think Ryle did it,’ said Clare.
‘Why not?’
‘He’s been in the firm long enough to know that this Protheroe was the pomme of their yeux. They’d never sack him just on suspicion. No, I think Protheroe did it.’
‘But really, Clare—’
‘Yes, I know. Fouling his own nest, and all that. But he sounds a bit mad, from your description. Anyone would be, reading books all day for twenty-five years. You’d lose touch with what they call reality, wouldn’t you? I expect M. Miles egged him on to do it. All this quarrelling they put on in public—it doesn’t ring true to me, except as camouflage.’
<
br /> ‘Why should she egg him on?’
‘Or perhaps she blackmailed him into it.’
‘Why?’
‘To spite the General. Or the other General—the one who’s bringing the libel action. I’m sure she’s a vindictive woman. Perhaps the other General—’
‘Blair-Chatterley.’
‘—perhaps he’s the man who seduced her when she was a pure young maiden, if ever she was, which I very much doubt: the mystery man Ryle mentioned to you. So when she came out with that word “holocaust,” she and Protheroe were really gloating. Perhaps the child she had by Blair-Chatterley was one of the chaps who perished in the holocaust. Revenge-motive, see?’
‘It was stillborn. You’re raving, my dear girl. But as you’re interested, you’d better do some research for me. You said you know of Miss Miles—’
‘Yes. A woman who sat for me last year knew her—some time ago, though.’
‘The longer ago the better. Find out from this woman—no, why not go straight to the horse’s mouth? Invite Millicent Miles to sit for you. She’s vain enough to accept.’
‘Oh, all right. If I must,’ said Clare dubiously.
But, as it turned out, the circumstances called for a death mask of Millicent Miles, not a portrait head. At some time this very evening, perhaps while Nigel and Clare talked about her, she was having her throat cut.
Millicent Miles was at work on what was destined to be an unfinished autobiography, when it happened. The blinds were down, the electric fire was burning, the typewriter rattled away in the room at Wenham & Geraldine’s, and on the table beside it the pile of typescript silted higher. The frosted-glass window between this room and Stephen Protheroe’s was closed, its square pane showing no light from the other side. Millicent glanced at it for a moment, screwing up her eyes against the smoke from her cigarette: she glanced at her watch, then fell to work again. Whatever her other faults, as a writer and as a human being, she had remarkable power of concentration—so remarkable, indeed, that when the door behind her opened she did not look round. Either she was too absorbed to hear the door open, or she expected a visitor.
The visitor, in a swift movement, closed the door and turned the key. He then—let us say ‘he,’ though for reasons which will become apparent later, the sex of the visitor might be open to question—he then laid a grip-bag on the floor, and in the same action took a long pace which brought him directly behind Miss Miles’s chair.
‘Just a minute,’ she said, still not looking round. As last words, these were both undistinguished and unavailing. The visitor was not prepared to wait even a minute. His gloved right hand thrust round over her arms, which were stretched out towards the typewriter; and his right arm, clamping them to her body, tilted the chair back. At the same instant his gloved left hand stuffed a piece of cloth into the mouth as it opened to cry out, knocking the cigarette away in the process. The visitor then swiftly changed arms. His left one went round her arms and body, drawing the chair away from the desk and tilting it back still farther, while his right hand dived into a pocket, whipped out a razor and opened it. Her staring eyes hardly had time to change from astonishment to terror before the razor had done its work.
All this had taken no more than ten seconds. The visitor let the back of the chair gently down to the ground, took the dying woman under the armpits and dragged her body off the chair to a corner of the room, where he let it lie flat. She was still making gurgling sounds, so he thrust the cloth deeper into her mouth and throat. He then—and throughout, the visitor performed with the swiftness and precision of an actor who has rehearsed his stage moves to perfection—took a staple from his pocket, and with a heavy ebony ruler he had picked up from the table hammered one point into the frame of the sliding window, the other into its wooden surround. Four firm blows, and the window was fastened shut.
Next, the visitor removed his bloodstained gauntlet gloves; he took a clean pair from the bag, put them on, and sat down to the typewriter. He turned to the pile of typescript on the table. Though his gloved hands made it difficult to sift the pages, he soon found what he wanted. He slipped out a certain page of Miss Miles’s autobiography and crumpled it into his pocket. Then, flicking out the sheet which was already in the machine, he inserted a fresh one and began to type. A few minutes later, a door banged down the passage. The visitor took a deep breath, but continued typing as the feet approached the door. They passed it, hurrying. If there were other people moving about in the building farther off, the typewriter drowned any noises they might be making.
The visitor now took the sheet out of the machine, and substituted it for the one he had removed from the pile of typescript. He began to get up, but as if on afterthought glanced over a few sheets of the typescript which came before the one he had removed. Something caught his eye, making him draw in his breath sharply. He reached for the india-rubber, examined it to see there was no blood on it, then carefully rubbed out whatever it was that had offended him. After looking through several more pages, he placed the pile of typescript face down on the table again.
He now lifted the typewriter and laid it on the floor, choosing a dry spot, near the body of Millicent Miles, who by this time was evidently dead. Raising each of her hands in turn, and wiping first the several fingers which had blood on them, he pressed the fingertips against the keys of the machine, then replaced it on the table, and re-inserted the sheet he had originally taken out.
Throat-cutting is a messy procedure. There was a great deal of blood on Miss Miles’s dress, and on the floor beside her, and in the middle of the room where she had been murdered. There was blood, too, on the forearms of the visitor’s coat, and a few stains elsewhere received from its contact with the chair. But the visitor, who had otherwise manifested so much forethought and care, did not take any great precaution against stepping in the pools of blood. He gave a last look round the room—a look which comprehended everything except the hideous gash in the victim’s throat. He tapped his pocket: the razor was there all right. He took off the goloshes he was wearing, wrapped them in newspaper and put them into the bag. Finally, moving round the edge of the room where there was no blood, he levered out the staple from the sliding window and returned to the door.
For a moment he stood there, listening intently; glanced at his watch—he had been in the room for a little more than fifteen minutes. Taking up the bag, which appeared to weigh heavy for its size, he turned out the light, unlocked the door, and was in the passage. Locking the door from the outside and pocketing the key, the visitor walked down the dim-lit passage towards the lift.
1 See The Whisper in the Gloom
Chapter 7
Query
NIGEL STRANGEWAYS ARRIVED at Angel Street at 9.30 on the Monday morning, his cold in full flood. He had discovered no unauthorised fingerprints on the proof of Time to Fight; and however fascinating might be an investigation into Millicent Miles’s past, he felt sure the partners would not spend money on it. The case was over, for him. The trail had gone cold months ago, and it would never be possible to prove who had let in Wenham & Geraldine for this disastrous libel action, however strong his suspicions might be. Of material evidence, there was none.
Entering the reception room, he noticed Miriam Sanders looking worried.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
Worry melted her hostility for a moment. ‘It’s the key,’ she replied, glancing down at her desk and up again.
‘What key?’
‘The key of the room Miss Miles is using. The cleaners left a message to say they couldn’t get in there this morning. The door was locked.’
‘Well, I expect she took it home by mistake. Why not ring her up?’
‘I did. But she’s not at home. The German maid sounded in rather a state—I couldn’t make out what about—she’s got hardly a word of English.’
‘It’s not your worry.’
‘But Miss Miles is not supposed to take the key away without telling me.’
Nigel dismissed the matter and went upstairs, wondering vaguely why Miss Sanders was fussing. Stephen Protheroe was already at his desk. They discussed their weekends—Nigel nursing a cold at home, Stephen visiting friends in Hampshire—for a few minutes. Arthur Geraldine came in.
‘Did Miss Miles say if she was coming back today?’
Protheroe shook his head.
‘Apparently she’s locked her room and taken away the key. It’s a damned nuisance. I told her on Friday morning we needed the room for other purposes.’
Stephen sniffed. ‘Typical! If she can’t have the room herself, she’ll see to it that we can’t use it.’
‘But surely there’s a spare key?’ Nigel asked.
‘It’s been mislaid. I’ve sent for a locksmith to open the door.’
‘Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’
But Arthur Geraldine remained, oddly irresolute, gazing out of the window, then at a calendar on the wall, till Stephen remarked irritably:
‘If you want to know whether she’s coming back, look and see if she’s left her typescript on the table.’
‘But we can’t get it, I’ve just told you … Oh, I’d forgotten the sliding window.’
Arthur Geraldine, emanating a queer uneasiness, grasped the knob resolutely, as if it were a nettle, and after a moment’s hesitation pulled the window open.
‘Yes, the typescript’s— My God, she’s there! On the floor!’
Nigel had to shoulder Geraldine away from the window—he seemed frozen to the spectacle within. Though the blinds were down in that room, enough light came through them and the sliding window to show the body lying in the far left-hand corner. Nigel made way for Stephen Protheroe, who exclaimed, his voice rising to a squawk:
‘She’s cut her throat!’
Arthur Geraldine was muttering in a distraught way, ‘I knew there was something wrong, I knew there was something wrong.’ His face trembled like a pink jelly.
‘How could you possibly know?’ Stephen sounded irritable again.
End of Chapter Page 8
