Further questions eliciting no more information about Ryle, or any other possible suspects, the three men left.
‘Well,’ said Wright, when they were in the police car on the way to the dead woman’s house in Chelsea, ‘what do we make of him?’
Fenton could contain himself no longer. ‘Downright immoral, I call it! Talking about his mother like that; and then what he was up to with his girlfriend. Shameless little blighter!’
Nigel said, ‘I think he’s rather pathetic.’
‘I think he’s damned dangerous,’ Wright cut in. ‘I don’t like engines rushing around without drivers. How clever is he, though? Clever enough to invent that story about blackmailing his mother?’
‘Doesn’t give him much of an alibi, sir,’ said Fenton.
‘No. But a chap who expects to screw money out of his mother by threatening to expose her over that proof copy affair—well, he wouldn’t go cutting her throat till he was sure she wouldn’t play. Is that how he wants us to reason?’
‘I don’t see him as a throat-cutter,’ said Nigel. ‘He’d think up something more subtle and long-distance.’
‘He acted violent enough just now,’ Fenton remarked.
‘Yes, but that was off-the-cuff, my lad; and besides, you’d been brutal to one of his dear little pets.’
‘Brutal! Well I—’
‘Whereas the killing of Millicent Miles was a premeditated affair,’ Wright continued. ‘Why “pathetic,” Mr. Strangeways?’
‘Oh, that room! Full of things he’s begun and never finished—pursuits he’s taken up and dropped. Trying to prove to himself that he can do something really well, and invariably failing—do something except drink and cadge and seduce girls.’
‘“A museum of false starts,” eh?’
‘I’m sorry for the children of successful people. They so often don’t inherit their parents’ talent, or stamina, or whatever it is that has made them successful. But they desperately want to impress their parents, somehow or other.’
‘By cutting their throats, for instance?’ said Fenton.
‘Fenton, don’t be crude,’ Wright snapped. ‘Sarcasm doesn’t become you.’
‘No, sir. Beg pardon.’
‘Were you a problem-child, Fenton?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Never threw harmless animals around the room when you were a boy?’
‘No, sir,’ replied Fenton in a repressed tone. Inspector Wright was popular with his subordinates; but, as they said, ‘you had to watch him’; his reactions were not always predictable, nor could you always be sure if he was pulling your leg or tearing you off a strip.
Millicent Miles’s house in Chelsea owed more to an internal decorator than to its late mistress. Of course, she had only been living here a few months; but the rooms held no personal flavour at all—they were like demonstration rooms in some exhibition of Gracious Living. If they gave any other positive impression, it was that impression of unshared life which one often receives from the houses of widows, ex-mistresses or business women.
Nigel translated while Inspector Wright questioned Miss Miles’s German maid. Hilda Langbaum, a stocky, flaxen-haired fräulein, was at first frightened and over-obsequious, then—since the English police showed no inclination to bully her—grumbling, voluble, and rather malicious about her late employer. Miss Miles was not sympathetic: she had been by turns brusque and inquisitive: she kept everything locked up: she was erratic in her comings and goings, inconsiderate about household arrangements: she was insufficiently appreciative of Hilda Langbaum’s excellent cooking: she used bad language.
Yes, Mr. Gleed had come to the house occasionally, but not during the last few weeks. No, her mistress had seemed her usual self when she left for the office on Friday morning. Men visitors? Yes, sometimes alone, sometimes for small dinner parties; their names could be found in the engagement book, which was on Miss Miles’s desk. The most recent visitor had been Mr. Ryle: he arrived about 9.30 on Thursday night; Hilda did not know how long he had stayed—she herself went up to bed soon after 10. Had a Mr. Protheroe been to the house? Not to Hilda’s knowledge. Or any other members of the publishing firm? Mr. and Mrs. Geraldine and Miss Wenham were invited to dinner in September, but had not visited the house since.
At this point Mr. Deakin, the dead woman’s solicitor, arrived, by appointment, to examine her papers with Inspector Wright. The two men repaired to the study for this purpose. A key had been found in Miss Miles’s handbag, which Hilda Langbaum identified as the key to the desk drawer in which her mistress had kept all the other keys. The Yale to the side-door of Wenham & Geraldine’s was not to be found in this drawer, however, and Fenton was sent to search the other rooms for it. The course of the investigation, Nigel realised, must depend considerably for the present upon whether Millicent Miles or someone else had ‘borrowed’ this key: if she had not done so herself, then it seemed probable that the murderer must have got hold of it: and why should he need it, except to enter the publishers’ office after the main door had been locked at 5.30? The partners and Stephen Protheroe already possessed keys to the side door; which suggested that the murderer must be either some other member of the firm or an outsider conversant with its habits.
Nigel mooched after Fenton for a few minutes, then returned to the study. Here Inspector Wright handed him a desk diary, indicating two recent entries: ‘R., 9.30’ was scribbled in last Thursday’s space—that would be Basil Ryle’s visit. Friday showed a luncheon engagement, and below it the laconic entry ‘Thorsday?!’ Nigel pondered on the question mark, the exclamation mark, and the revealing pun, as he drifted down to the basement kitchen.
Hilda Langbaum was making herself a cup of coffee, and Nigel accepted one too. The girl was clearly worried about her immediate future; Nigel told her he would arrange with the solicitor that she should receive wages up to the end of the month and be allowed to stay on in the house for a week or two, if she so wished, while looking around for another job. Her gratitude for this small kindness was excessive. Nigel drew her on to talk for a while about her home in Nuremburg. Confidence being established, he led the conversation, via Hilda’s fiancé whose photograph she showed him, to Basil Ryle. Hilda became at once sentimental and melodramatic. Such a good young man. So deeply in love. And the way she had treated him! A cold woman, a heartless, a mocker. A German lover would have beaten her, made her go down on her knees; but the English men were soft; they did not understand that the man must be master; they ran away with their tails between their legs, like Mr. Ryle the other night.
Hilda had not wished to speak of this to the police; but Mr. Strangeways was different, sympathetic.
‘When I went upstairs to bed,’ said Hilda, encouraged to continue, ‘I heard their voices in the drawing-room. I do not understand your language, but I could not help listening. She was lashing him with her tongue. It was like a whip of ice. He spoke little; he sounded bewildered, shocked, as if—as if an angel had suddenly spat in his face. He was pleading then, I think; but she laughed—oh, very ugly her laughter was. And the next minute that poor Mr. Ryle hurried from the room and ran downstairs out of the house. He did not see me. He looked quite blind; and deathly white in the face, like a spectre.’
Chapter 9
Insert
THAT AFTERNOON NIGEL settled down with Millicent Miles’s autobiography, which he had picked up at Scotland Yard when Inspector Wright had finished his work in the dead woman’s house. The search there had brought no clues to light, unless the cryptic entry in her diary for Friday afternoon—‘Thorsday?!’—could be called a clue. The solicitor having stated that he had drawn up no will for his client, and no will being found amongst her papers, there was a strong presumption that she had died intestate. Nigel hoped that the autobiography would be more revealing than the Chelsea house: indeed, he approached it with the liveliest interest. Millicent Miles had possessed one quality of the great writer—that Negative Capability which enables its possessor to take
on the colour of his environment, surrender himself to the personality of another. With her it was no more than a chameleon trick, and a trick which she had learnt to exploit. But she had been one woman to the infatuated Basil Ryle, and a quite different woman to the sardonic Stephen Protheroe.
What was she to herself? Would the autobiography reveal the real woman behind this fluid personality, or would it offer only another illusion—a Millicent Miles cunningly adapted to the fantasies of her avid readers?
One thing was plain from the start: the reader would be taken into her confidence. She gave the effect of singling him out, drawing him aside, telling him things that were not for every ear. It was done with quite remarkable plausibility; and you had to keep your wits about you to perceive that this intimate address in fact disclosed far less than it appeared to. Her writing has the surface frankness of a mirror rather than the candour of transparent glass, thought Nigel. As he read on, he began to realise that every incident, every person in the book was a mirror set at just the right angle to reflect its author most becomingly. When she confessed some childish peccadillo, she conveyed the impression of a high-spirited girl, a jolly, romping tomboy whose escapades one could not but view with a smile of indulgence. When she hinted, ever so delicately, at dissension in the home, one could almost hear the rustle as a not quite opaque veil was drawn over her parents’ less agreeable aspects; how sensitive the poor child must have been, you were led to think; and how wonderful she is to bear no resentment for the way she must have suffered.
It really is a masterpiece of calculated dishonesty, Nigel reflected; but before long he changed his mind, judging that Millicent Miles, like every best-seller of her type, believed implicitly in every word she wrote, at any rate while she wrote it, and was sublimely unconscious of contradictions or self-deception. That she could combine this unawareness with so skilful a manipulation of the reader’s responses argued a most subtle sleight-of-mind—an egotism and fundamental irresponsibility truly formidable.
Nigel wondered how Miss Miles had proposed to explain to Basil Ryle the discrepancies between the story of her adolescence, as she had told it to him, and as she related it in her book. According to the book, though her father, a commission agent, had certainly gone bankrupt, he was neither a drunkard nor a sadist: she pictured him as a jovial, bumbling, fumbling character, whose sins were of omission rather than commission. Nor was her mother represented here as a slut and a domestic tyrant: she was, instead, a strait-laced woman of the Baptist persuasion who had done no worse than nag her husband incessantly and fail to understand her daughter’s girlish aspirations. Nevertheless, though the treatment of these two in the early chapters was the reverse of satirical or denunciatory, an atmosphere of sweet forgiveness suspired from between the lines—a kind of holy hush which suggested that the author had had a good deal to hush up. Again, she had certainly got a job as shop assistant at the age of seventeen; but it was in a bookshop, and she did not run away from home to do so.
Nigel could hardly wait to get to Millicent Miles at nineteen, when—so she had told Basil Ryle—she was seduced and gave birth to a stillborn baby. With what convulsions of euphemism would she handle that passage of her life? Or, more likely, it had been another outrageous fiction invented to enlist the sympathies of poor Ryle. However, compelling himself not to skip, Nigel ploughed on through the suburban tennis parties, the droll accounts of school or family friends, the young Millicent’s lush responses to the Beauties of Nature and the Heritage of Great Literature, her parents’ incapacity to ‘understand’ her, the wincing sensibility which she hid from them beneath a hoyden’s manner, the (carefully-edited) facts of budding womanhood, the clothes she had worn and the thoughts she had thought.
All this, Nigel found sufficiently unreal. And the unreality was heightened by the author’s habit of naming certain people with an initial capital and a dash. This secretiveness, tiresome in itself, became doubly so when Nigel discovered that the initials were fictive; in the margin, each time a new character appeared, the author had pencilled an initial capital, different from the one which appeared in the text. The annotations, Nigel presumed, were an ‘aide-mémoire’ and gave the correct initial.
Half-way through Chapter Four, he found a note from Inspector Wright pinned to the next page. ‘A capital G has been erased from the margin opposite line 19.’ A little flutter, like a cat’s-paw on a calm sea, ran along Nigel’s nerves. He was in contact with the murderer. The conviction was irrational—after all, Millicent Miles could have erased the G herself; but Nigel felt certain this was the murderer’s work. Slowly he read the paragraphs in question, straining his inward ear to catch their overtones.
It was a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday that I met the man whom I shall call Rockingham. He came into the bookshop one afternoon, and we got into conversation. Little did I realise, as we discussed the latest batch of novels upon the shelves, serene and mysterious in their dainty jackets, that this shy, gangling young man would one day be a power in the world of letters. It was enough for me to discover, as I soon did—for there must have been already an affinity between us, which enabled me to overcome our mutual shyness and draw him out—that Rockingham was a fellow-craftsman: he had even had work published in magazines. Ah, the magic of print to the young aspirant! I wonder does the modern generation, who have fearlessly destroyed so many obsolete shibboleths, understand what it has lost by discarding too the fine, youthful, eager virtue of hero-worship? To me, then, a writer was a god. And if this particular god transpired later to have feet of clay, no shadow of premonition darkened my bliss at this first rencontre.
I sent him a short story I had written, and he returned it with criticism and encouragement that were worth more than a king’s ransom to the diffident girl I then was. When I myself became ‘famous,’ and budding authors began to shower me with their prentice efforts, I remembered what Rockingham had once done for me. I resolved to set aside one precious hour every day to help these correspondents. Busy as my life has been, and with a full share of the anguish which falls to every woman’s lot, I have always kept this resolution. My reward has been the gratitude of literally hundreds of aspirants to the laurels. This gratitude, no less than the loyalty of my faithful readers, effaces for me the sneers of the so-called highbrows. It makes me feel loved—and what woman does not want to feel loved? And it makes me humble.
It was not very rewarding, thought Nigel. All he could extract from this chunk of stale, oversweetened self-praise was that ‘Rockingham’ had had feet of clay, that his real name began with G, and that he became ‘a power in the world of letters.’
‘G.’ It could stand for ‘Goggles,’ who might or might not be Stephen Protheroe: it could hardly stand for Miss Miles’s second husband, the racing motorist. But again, bearing in mind her practice of referring to gentlemen by their surnames alone, it might stand for Arthur Geraldine.
Nigel read on, hoping to find some explanation of ‘Rockingham’s’ feet of clay. His name, however, did not recur in the chapter. Half-way down the last page but one of this chapter, a new paragraph started:
So, as a writer, I was trying out my fledgling wings. But something else in me was budding too, ready to blossom at a touch of the sun. I was nineteen, an ardent, inexperienced girl, my womanhood struggling to emerge as a butterfly from the chrysalis. What can a mere man—even the most sensitive and upright man (and there are some of them still to be found, thank God)—what can a man know of the sweet bewilderment, the radiant expectation, the quivering, throbbing ecstasy which possesses a girl’s heart when first it turns to love, as a heliotrope to the sun? Ah, magic days, when we are in love with love! When everything is tinged with ‘the light that never was on sea or land’! Looking back on that time now, when the wound is healed and the bitterness has been long forgotten, I can say with the poet, ‘So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.’
Yes, I fell in love. I brought to love all the pent-up ardour, the desire to give and
give and never count the cost, for which my life at home had, alas, offered no outlet. The man I chose has appeared.
Nigel turned the page. He did not need the note, which Inspector Wright had pinned on the next sheet, to tell him that this was the one the murderer had inserted. It was just perceptibly whiter than the pages preceding and following it, which had been stacked for months in the dusty room at Wenham & Geraldine’s. Unless Miss Miles had herself removed the last page of this chapter recently, and re-typed it, no one but the murderer could be responsible; and Miss Miles’s method of composition, rapid and uncritical, rendered it extremely improbable that she should have redrafted just this one page of the typescript. Besides, there was the evidence of the sheet found in her typewriter after the murder, taken out and then replaced out of alignment, to strengthen the likelihood that the murderer had done some typing after committing his crime. Nigel read the last page of Chapter Four:
often to me in my dreams, since the day when the destiny which had brought us together tore us apart. But I never saw him again in the flesh. To meet him, even after all these years, would be unthinkable. Yet we seemed twin souls to each other! I loved him—yes, I confess it—as I have loved no man since. I gave him … everything. Freely, proudly, with all the passion of a nature starved for love, did I give. We were both poor, struggling. Marriage was out of the question. Perhaps—who knows?—if I had had a child by him, we might have outfaced the poverty, survived the disillusions that the flesh is heir to, and gone through life together hand in hand. But an inscrutable Providence decreed otherwise.
Towards the end of that year I fell seriously ill. Kind friends lent me the money to go abroad and spend some months in a sanatorium. When I returned, he, my beloved, was gone. I will draw a veil over my sufferings. I can be thankful for them now, since they gave me the deep sympathy, the understanding of human pain and human courage, which have enabled me to help others through my books. But at the time, with nothing of his to remember him by, I lived through an eternity of loneliness, emptiness—an ice age, a desert of stone. Even today, my pen falters as I trace these memories—
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