End of Chapter

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘Did you see much of him?’

  ‘A bit. The noble army of martyrs had to report in at the office twice a week and have their corns attended to. Dour, stocky chap—a slit where his mouth should be—Irish—a bit of a lad with the girls, I’d guess. Though I’d rather be kissed by a shark, myself. Mutatis, of course, mutandis.’

  ‘No actual scandal about a girl? One of the customers’ daughters?’

  ‘Not that I heard. And if he’d forced his welcome attentions on a young female, it’d have been all over the office before she’d had time to renew her lipstick.’

  ‘Would it have been part of his job as a representative to visit the local book shops?’

  ‘Bless your heart, no. We were in competition, don’t you see? Course he might have gone in to buy a book—never know what these University types aren’t capable of when roused.’

  ‘You say they all had literary ambitions. Do you remember if Arthur Geraldine wrote at all then?’

  ‘Now you’re asking something. Couldn’t be sure, but I’ve an idea he had a piece or two in the holier-than-thou weeklies. But his real hobby was collecting bits of china. Probably that’s why he stuck the job as long as he did. While he’s explaining the benefits of the Daily Sun free gift scheme, he can run his eye over the mantelpiece and see if the client’s harbouring a Dresden angel unawares. Wimblesham was more countrified those days, and the natives wouldn’t always know the value of the sweet little vases great-aunt Flossie had left them. He picked up quite a few bargains, I know for a fact, in the crockery line. Remember him panting back to the office one day with a dinner-plate in his bag—one of a set he’d chiselled some sucker out of—not that he put it that way: you should have heard him crooning over it! Looked like any other dinner-plate to me.’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘Oh, a sort of washed-out brown. Browny-yellow.’

  ‘Apricot?’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  Nigel’s mood of elation, on leaving the ebullient Mr. Jackson, was short-lived. It seemed certain that Arthur Geraldine had ‘acquired’ the Rockingham set during his house-to-house canvassing of Wimblesham in 1924. It seemed likely, but was in no way proved, that this set had belonged to the Miles’. If, as a girl, Millicent Miles had known about the transaction; if, last summer, she recognised Arthur Geraldine as the quondam Daily Sun representative who had bought the set at far below its true value—this would explain both Geraldine’s unwillingness for Nigel to start digging up the remote past, and the unusual concessions he had made to Miss Miles. She might well have been putting pressure on him. But the affair of the Rockingham set was still nothing like adequate motive for murder.

  And what possible link could there be between this and the dirty work with the proof copy of Time to Fight?

  If, on the other hand, Millicent Miles had had a child by Rockingham-Geraldine in 1926, if he had abandoned her and the child, then she would have a far stronger blackmailing card against him, and he a proportionately stronger motive for murder. But why had she not played it years ago? She had moved in the literary world since about 1930: she would be bound to know that Arthur Geraldine had become a successful publisher. Perhaps the answer was that only recently, when her stock as a writer had slumped, would she need to apply pressure on Geraldine.

  The child, Nigel reflected as the underground train rushed him back to Kensington, would be thirty now. What had happened to him, or her? Not that there was the least evidence he had ever existed—only a tenuous hint given by the page the murderer had inserted in the dead woman’s autobiography—the (? deliberately misleading) statement that she never had a child by her first lover.

  Nigel’s eye was caught by a headline in the newspaper a man opposite him was reading. NATIONAL SERVICE TO BE CUT? Some of the young soldiers destroyed in the ‘holocaust’ of the Ulombo barracks, he recollected, were National Servicemen. A spark leapt a gap, and the two dark poles of the case were suddenly linked in Nigel’s mind. The Ulombo barracks affair had taken place in 1947, when Millicent Miles’s child would have been 21—National Service age.

  And was there ever a more hare-brained conjecture than that? thought Nigel as he came out into Kensington High Street—a cobweb theory built upon a mere coincidence. Of course it must be a coincidence.

  Nevertheless, he was walking very fast indeed up Campden Hill Road, impatient to get to the telephone. When he had let himself into the flat, his housekeeper told him that a young gentleman had arrived an hour ago, asking to see him. A Mr. Gleed. She had told him that Mr. Strangeways might not be back for some time, but he said he would wait. Mrs. Anson was clearly a bit flustered: strangers who arrived unannounced and refused to go presented a problem she could not cope with. Assuring her that no harm had been done, Nigel entered the sitting-room.

  Cyprian Gleed had made himself at home. He was sitting in Nigel’s armchair, with a glass of Nigel’s whisky at his elbow, and his mother’s autobiography on his lap.

  ‘Good evening,’ said Nigel coldly. ‘I see you found the decanter. Wouldn’t you like some water with it?’

  ‘No thanks.’ Cyprian Gleed seemed unsnubbable. ‘I didn’t mean to stay so long, but I couldn’t resist this horror-comic,’ he added, indicating the typescript on his lap.

  ‘I see. Well, excuse me a minute.’ Nigel went into his bedroom and picked up the extension telephone there. General Thoresby, he was told, would be home shortly. Nigel left a message, asking the General to ring him as soon as possible.

  The purpose of Cyprian Gleed’s visit was not immediately apparent. He complained of being incessantly questioned and followed by policemen. He resented being told nothing about the progress of the investigation. Finally, by a devious route, he came to the point. When could he expect to inherit his mother’s estate?

  ‘Why ask me? You should deal with her solicitors.’

  ‘Oh, they just say there are the usual formalities to go through. I don’t understand all their legal jargon. What formalities?’

  ‘Well, they have to make sure there’s no will, and that you are the next-of-kin.’

  ‘But there’s no question of that,’ Gleed’s red lips twisted behind the black beard, as he jabbed a finger at the typescript. ‘She seems to have had some squalid love-affair at a tender age, but she makes it quite clear the union was unblessed by fruit. And she certainly didn’t have any other children by her various legitimate husbands.’

  ‘You’d be fairly safe to borrow on your expectations, then.’

  ‘You think so? Do you lend money, by any chance?’

  ‘Not to you.’

  Gleed took another drag of his neat whisky. ‘I suppose Wenham & Geraldine aren’t going to publish this tripe now?’

  ‘Why not? It’s unfinished, but—’

  ‘Good God! Have you read it? The meanderings of an imperfectly sublimated nymphomaniac! How the hell should I ever live it down?’

  ‘What do you care? It’ll bring you in a lot more money. That’s all you’re interested in, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ah, you’re shocked. Money’s a dirty word—never mentioned in your high-minded circles,’ jeered Cyprian. ‘Whereas mothers are holy, however rotten—’

  ‘You really are a contemptible little creature,’ Nigel broke in, speaking with icy deliberation. ‘You talk like a permanent adolescent, and behave like a spoilt child. Do you really think you impress anyone by mouthing all this vicious muck about your mother? The trouble with you is that you’ve got no talents and no charm—you’re a total failure as a human being, and you know it—so you’ve got to compensate by making a pretentious nuisance of yourself all round. Well, did you cut your mother’s throat or didn’t you? There are no witnesses present. You’ve a chance to make yourself really interesting for once, and with impunity. Come on, my bold little Orestes.’

  Nigel’s outburst, though sharpened by the sheer physical revulsion he felt for Cyprian Gleed, was a calculated experiment. How would Gleed respond to treatment even more outrageous th
an his own utterances?

  Cyprian Gleed stared back venomously at Nigel. ‘Have you quite finished your orgasm?’

  ‘You’ve often wished your mother dead. But you’d neither the brains nor the nerve to kill her. That’s why you spent so much time shooting off your poisonous tongue at her, from a safe distance. Well, she’s dead now. So you can stop shooting.’

  ‘Ah, I thought the de mortuis stuff was due. That is really more than I can face. I must be going. Sorry to leave you in uncertainty about my martricidal history; but when next you try a bit of psychological vivisection, I’d recommend you to use a scalpel, or even a razor, not a blunt flint—it was all too painfully obvious.’ A singular, gloating expression came and went on Cyprian Gleed’s face. ‘I find you quite remarkably antipathetic. Do you mind if I use your lavatory to be sick in?’

  ‘First door on the right down the passage.’

  As Cyprian was going out, the telephone bell rang.

  ‘I’ll let myself out, when I’ve finished,’ Cyprian said. ‘You probably won’t be seeing me again.’

  The door closed behind him, and Nigel took up the receiver.

  ‘Strangeways? Thoresby here. You asked me to ring you.’

  ‘Yes. That Ulombo barracks affair. Have you got the casualty list?’

  ‘Just a minute. I’ll dig it out of my files. They were all scuppered, y’know. Hold on.’

  When the General was back on the line, Nigel asked, ‘Can you tell me, is there a Geraldine on the list, or a Miles?’

  ‘Now what the devil are you up to, my dear fellow? I don’t remember a—I’ll look.’

  The twenty seconds of silence seemed twenty minutes to Nigel. At last General Thoresby said:

  ‘No. Drawn a blank there, I’m afraid.’

  Nigel felt the disappointment like a kick in the belly. Yet his had been a pretty wild shot in the dark.

  ‘Very good of you, sir. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Just another theory of mine miles off the target.

  ‘Wait a bit, my boy. If you’re interested in literary names, publishing names and so forth, what price Protheroe?’

  ‘Protheroe?’

  ‘Yes. Isn’t that the name of Wenham & Geraldine’s reader?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  “Well, there’s a Paul Protheroe on this casualty list. A corporal. One of the National Servicemen who was on the strength there.’

  Chapter 12

  Lead In

  WHILE NIGEL STRANGEWAYS was delving into the remoter past, Inspector Wright and his team had been investigating the more recent. At a conference the morning after General Thoresby’s telephone call, the two men pooled their information. Double-checking their movements of the previous Friday, Wright had finally eliminated from suspicion such peripheral figures as the General himself and the dead woman’s third husband: the latter had had no personal contact with her since their divorce. As to the Wenham & Geraldine people, and Cyprian Gleed, Wright’s inquiries had still produced mainly negative results.

  It was clear to Nigel that the inspector had been concentrating upon Cyprian Gleed. Naturally so. There was no love lost between him and his mother: he was an irresponsible, amoral and possibly violent character: he needed money badly, but his mother had refused to give him any more until his next allowance was due. Wright had discovered, furthermore, that Gleed was being pressed hard by several creditors for payment of quite considerable sums. So far, so good. But house-to-house inquiries, both in Angel Street and the vicinity of Gleed’s flat, together with the usual appeals to taxi-drivers, etc., had so far turned up no trace of evidence that Gleed had left his flat between 4.30 and 7 p.m. on the night of the murder.

  Repeated questioning had done nothing to shake the alibis, such as they were, of the other suspects: they had not, any of them, materially modified the evidence given in their original statements, nor contradicted themselves over matters of detail.

  It seemed almost certain to Wright that the murderer must have brought a bag with him in which to take away the weapon and his bloodstained clothing. The question was, when did he remove the bag from the building? It could have been done either (a) immediately after the murder, or (b) at some time during the weekend by anyone who had a key to the side-door; it would have been quite safe to leave the bag overnight, since the office part of the building was empty from Friday evening till Monday morning. Inspector Wright’s research into this postulated piece of luggage had yielded the following results:

  Stephen Protheroe had brought a kit-bag into the office on Friday morning. Miss Sanders noticed he was carrying it when he left the office at 5.20 p.m. The Hampshire friends, with whom he stayed the weekend, said it was his first visit and confirmed that he had brought a kit-bag, of the same colour and size. Moreover, his host had been chatting with him in the bedroom when he unpacked it: Stephen had thrown the contents on to the bed—an unthinkable thing to do if they included bloodstained clothing and weapon.

  Basil Ryle. Nobody had seen him with a bag that Friday. On the other hand, no one could swear he had not brought one to the office, and it might easily have been hidden in his room. He had walked across Hungerford Bridge to the Festival Hall; he could have checked a bag in at a cloakroom there, before dinner, but there was no evidence that he had done so.

  Liz Wenham was definitely not carrying a bag when she came to the cocktail party in Chelsea. Her taxi-driver had been traced, and stated that she had no luggage with her when she entered his cab in the Strand shortly after 5.30. They had not stopped anywhere on the way to Chelsea.

  There remained Arthur Geraldine. His wife said that she had heard him come into the flat at about ten to six. He had gone straight to the bedroom, bathed and changed—his normal custom. He could have taken off blood-stained clothes then and concealed them, but it would have been a risky proceeding. He was his usual self at dinner, so Mrs. Geraldine said.

  As to the weekend, the situation was even more open. Arthur Geraldine, for instance, had worked at home on the Saturday morning, then gone for a spin with his wife to Richmond. The garage attendant stated that Mr. Geraldine was carrying no bag when he arrived to fetch the car. The whereabouts of Miss Wenham and Mr. Ryle could not be corroborated for the whole of Saturday and Sunday. Stephen Protheroe had unquestionably been in Hampshire. Cyprian Gleed’s drunken progress would be almost impossible to trace from beginning to end.

  But Inspector Wright was now sceptical of the theory that the murderer had gone back to retrieve a bag during the weekend. Angel Street would be much quieter then, and he would run a greater risk of being noticed letting himself in at the side-door. Also, he could not be sure that Mr. and Mrs. Geraldine, or their maid, might not be going out when he entered.

  ‘So we’re back in the bosom of dear old Mother Thames,’ said Wright, raising his eyebrows interrogatively at Nigel.

  ‘I see. Yes. It looks the best bet. Not the Embankment, though.’

  ‘Not unless he lost his head and tried to get rid of it as soon as possible. No. Hungerford Bridge. I took a stroll across it last night in the rush-hour. Plenty of people hurrying over to catch trains at Waterloo. Like a crowd of sheep, these commuters—never notice anything—just want to get back to the little woman and the telly. As you walk over the bridge south, there are small arc-lights on the girders above you, to your right. Your left side is in shadow. You hold the bag over the rail with your left hand and just let go, without stopping walking: or you stop a moment to admire the beautiful reflections of light on the water. It’s just too easy. There are trains rumbling over the bridge almost every minute during the rush hour. Drown the splash. Goodbye to the evidence. Of course, you’d have to weight the bag to make sure it sank. So it’d have to be a pretty strong one, or it’d burst on hitting the water. But no doubt he’d give his mind to a little problem like that.’

  ‘You’ll drag the river? At low tide? Or use frogmen?’

  ‘It’s being done. But the tides are fierce. Bag’s halfway to Tilbury by now, I sh
ould think. Scuttling along the river-bed.’

  ‘Well, if you’re right, it narrows down the suspects a bit.’

  ‘Yes. Protheroe and Ryle both walked over the bridge between 5.25 and 6.15.’

  ‘And told us, without any hesitation, that they’d done so.’

  ‘Exactly. Whereas your engaging boyfriend, Cyprian Gleed, says he was at home waiting for his mum to turn up, but could have been prancing about on the bridge.’

  ‘Are you issuing an appeal to the public?’

  ‘Yes. It’ll be in the Evenings, and tomorrow’s papers. And the wires’ll be red-hot with people ringing up to say they thought they might have seen a man or heard a splash or something. But as for identification—I ask you! Turn facing the river, lean over the rail, and the lights are behind you: your face is in shadow. Height, sex, and possibly clothing—that’s all anyone would see. But these commuters wouldn’t notice if you threw an elephant over.’

  Nigel now gave Inspector Wright a summary of his own operations over the last thirty-six hours. The trap he had laid at dinner with Arthur Geraldine and the others had remained unsprung; no attempt had been made to steal the typescript of Millicent Miles’s autobiography—not that it would have benefited the murderer, in fact, to do so, for there were photostat copies of the relevant pages at Scotland Yard. Cyprian Gleed’s interest in the book, however, gave Wright food for thought, and he made Nigel repeat the whole of their conversation.

  ‘So he wanted to know about his mother’s estate—the legal aspects,’ commented Wright thoughtfully. ‘And he said there was no question of him not being the next-of-kin, because, though she’d had a love-affair as a girl, there’d been no child by it. That’s rather significant, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It suggests that Gleed doesn’t realise that, even if she had had a child then, it couldn’t be next-of-kin—bastards don’t inherit where there is a legitimate child.’

  ‘All this is assuming she had a child and it was illegitimate.’ Nigel went on to tell Wright of his discoveries about Arthur Geraldine—Wright did not appear much interested in these—and the existence of a Paul Protheroe who had died in the Ulombo barracks.