‘General Thoresby is having his army record looked up for me, and I’ve got a chap at Somerset House searching the records of births for 1926. He’s going to ring me here if he finds anything before eleven o’clock.’
‘Protheroe’s not all that uncommon a name.’
‘No. But if she had a child, and Stephen Protheroe was its father, we at last get a link between the murder and the tampering with Thoresby’s book.’
‘You mean, either Protheroe, or Miss Miles, or both of them together, fiddled with the proof copy, knowing the boy had been killed at Ulombo—?’
‘Exactly. But it was Protheroe, I’d say, who did the fiddling. He’d want Blair-Chatterley exposed, to avenge the death of his son, caused by Blair-Chatterley’s incompetence. Miss Miles discovers he has tampered with the proof, threatens to tell on him to the partners; he kills her to safeguard his job.’
Nigel enlarged upon his theory with considerable excitement. When he had finished, Wright sat back scrutinising him, head cocked like a bird over a wormcast.
‘Well, well. It’s all very pretty. On paper. And you believe Protheroe is capable of murder? That sort of murder?’
Nigel was spared answering this uncomfortable question by the ringing of the inspector’s telephone.
‘For you. Somerset House.’
Nigel took the receiver, listened intently for a minute.
‘Hold on,’ he said: then, to Wright, ‘A child was born on 29th November, 1926, at Grengarth in Northumberland. Paul Protheroe. Names of parents on birth certificate—Stephen Protheroe and Millicent Protheroe. And it is the Paul Protheroe who was killed at Ulombo: date of death fits. Any questions?’
‘Ask him to search for record of a marriage between Protheroe and Millicent Miles. And ask him if anyone else had been making similar inquiries—within the last six months, say.’
Nigel passed on these requests, thanked his informant and replaced the receiver. Inspector Wright, who could never keep still for long, was doing a tap-dance with his fingers on the desk.
‘Well, it’s your pigeon,’ he said. ‘You’re investigating that libel affair for the publishers, and now you’ve got a lead. Chase Stephen Protheroe over that as hard as you like. But lay off the murder angle, Mr. Strangeways. Frankly, I’m not with you there—we haven’t a shred of evidence yet.’
Ten minutes later, when Nigel arrived at Angel Street, Miriam Sanders told him that Miss Wenham wished to see him immediately. Deferring the show-down with Stephen Protheroe, he went to her room. It was sunny this morning. The light, striking in obliquely through the fine, tall window, enhanced a brightly-coloured design for a dust-jacket lying on the work table and picked out the gold lettering on the spines of a uniform edition in the top shelf of a bookcase. It was less flattering to Liz Wenham’s looks. Her grey hair, even her eyes, usually so animated, lacked lustre today; the rosy-russet cheeks were sallower; she had the etiolated appearance of a fresh-air woman confined too long indoors.
‘Ah, here you are,’ she greeted him, making it—as often she did—sound like ‘where have you been all this time?’
‘You’re looking a bit tired,’ said Nigel sympathetically.
‘So would you be if you had to run this firm practically single-handed. Arthur’s tied up with the libel business half the time. And Basil seems to have conked out completely—can’t keep his mind on his work at all. Damn that woman! What I’d do without Stephen, I just don’t know.’
‘He’s bearing up all right?’
‘Stephen doesn’t cave in. He’s got backbone.’
‘Never?’
‘I don’t think he’s missed a day, holidays apart, for ten years.’ She suddenly brandished a sheaf of papers in Nigel’s face. ‘How many times have I told you to type the subscription orders in a separate—?’
‘Yes, Miss Wenham. I’m sorry.’
The secretary, who had entered silently, took the papers and fled from the room as if blown out of a wind-tunnel.
‘Silly girls! They’re all flustered out of their wits. When is that inspector of yours going to take himself off our necks?’
‘When he’s made an arrest, I suppose.’
For an instant, there was a glaze of fear, or anxiety, over Liz Wenham’s clear eyes.
‘It’s all nonsense,’ she roundly declared. ‘One of us! Quite preposterous. Is the inspector a shoe-fetishist?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The other evening he came round to my house and started poking about in my shoe-cupboard,’ said Liz, with high indignation. ‘It’s enough to turn me morbid.’
‘He was looking for goloshes, I expect.’
‘Goloshes? Gracious heavens, I’ve never worn such things in my life! Why goloshes?’
‘The murderer wore a pair. To prevent his shoes getting wet,’ Nigel flatly replied.
‘Oh, yes, I remember you mentioned it at dinner. But does your inspector really suppose that the—that whoever did it would just put the goloshes back in a cupboard? Piffle. What was I saying before that idiotic girl—?’
‘You were saying that Stephen Protheroe hadn’t missed a day for ten years. He doesn’t look all that strong to me. Is he never ill?’
‘He did have some sort of a breakdown about ten years ago—’ Liz Wenham uttered the word ‘breakdown’ in a markedly derogatory tone. ‘Away for a week or two. But there’s been no bother of that sort since.’
‘Overwork, was it?’
‘Nobody breaks down from overwork. Some emotional trouble, I fancy.’ Liz Wenham’s tone made it clear that she had little more sympathy for emotional troubles than for the breakdowns they caused.
‘Would that have been in 1947?’
‘I can’t think what possible interest this can have for you. Still. 1947? It was the year we published The Duteous Day—that I do remember. Stephen was doing the editorial work on it. Held up production, you know, his being away.’ Liz leant back and took a volume from the shelves behind her. ‘Here we are. Yes, it was 1947.’
Nigel now reminded Liz Wenham that she had asked to see him.
‘Oh yes. Two things. I wish you’d have a word with Basil; he’s gone broody, as I told you; I can’t manage to get him out of it. Needs a tonic, I dare say. And what was all that talk the other night,’ she continued, glancing shrewdly at Nigel, ‘about Arthur’s Rockingham set? You seem to have got under his skin somehow.’
‘Do you mean the subject cropped up again after I left?’
‘No. But when you said something about a Rockingham mentioned in the Miles autobiography, I noticed that Arthur looked annoyed. No, after you’d gone—I should tell you quite frankly—Arthur raised the question of paying you off. We’re very grateful to you for holding our hands through this police inquiry, but—’
‘I do quite understand. There’s the Time to Fight trouble to be cleared up, though.’
‘I thought you’d come to a dead end over that.’
‘I had. But yesterday I gathered some new information. I believe I know now why the proof was tampered with. And the “why” points to the “who.”’
At this point, Liz Wenham’s telephone rang and she went into a clinch with the literary agent at the other end. It would evidently be a prolonged tussle, so Nigel got up and made his way to Basil Ryle’s room.
The young man was in bad shape, no doubt of that—staring into vacancy and seeming, for a moment, not to recognise Nigel. His eyeballs, turning painfully to his visitor’s face, moved as if they had lead weights on them.
‘Sorry you’re under the weather,’ said Nigel. ‘Couldn’t you take a few days off?’
‘How much longer is this going on, for God’s sake?’ said Ryle in a collapsed voice.
‘The investigation? I’ve no idea.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘As long as you refuse to face up to reality,’ Nigel coolly said.
With his red hair tousled and dank, his defenceless face, Basil Ryle looked like a sick schoolboy.
<
br /> ‘I’ve faced too much reality this last week, I never want to see it again.’
‘No you haven’t. You’re still trying to make excuses for the way she treated you, trying to pretend to yourself that she was the marvellous creature you once thought her … No, listen to me. Do you know what you’re really fretting about? Not the loss of her. The loss of your self-respect. Self-respect means a lot to a chap who’s come up the hard way, like you have. And yours was too much involved in your relationship with her. When she turned on you and showed herself up in her true colours, she dealt a mortal blow at your ego. She falsified all the familiar landmarks of your relationship, so of course you were lost. “If she is not she, who on earth am I?” It’s a disintegrating experience, to feel like that. And ever since, you’ve been trying to re-create your illusion of her, because it’s the only way you know to restore your self-esteem and re-create yourself.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ Basil pathetically murmured.
‘But it’s all wrong! You can’t rebuild your life on an illusion. It gives way beneath you all the time. That’s why you’re in this wretched state now—it’ll turn neurotic if you aren’t careful. You’ve got to accept it that you were a fool, and she was—well, what she was. Stare that in the face for a while, and you’ll be cured.’
Basil Ryle lifted his lugubrious, red-rimmed eyes. ‘My God, I was a bloody fool all right! I ought to be—’
‘O.K. O.K. Face it, but don’t wallow in it. Self-disgust is a good stimulant but a bad habit.’
‘Sententious bastard, aren’t you?’ said Ryle, but smiling for the first time. ‘Funny, I didn’t much take to you when we met—ten days ago, was it?—time’s been no object since—’ His voice trailed away, and the look of being saturated in misery returned to his face.
‘Do you believe in brain-storms?’ he asked.
‘People have them.’
Making a great effort, as if dragging out the words against their own will, Basil Ryle said, ‘That’s what terrifies me—that I may have done it myself … I could have killed her, the night before: I ran out of her house so that I wouldn’t lay hands on her. I was in an absolute muck-sweat. How do I know I didn’t have a brain-storm the next night? All I remember is sitting here, in a daze of misery, humiliation, fury, and then going off to try and soothe my savage breast at the Festival Hall.’
‘Now do pull yourself together. I doubt if you’re a schizophrenic. Even if you are, and could have killed her in what you call a “brain-storm”, you certainly wouldn’t have planned everything ahead, as it was planned. This was a premeditated crime, thought out in every detail.’
‘Thank God for that! Well, you see what I mean. You’ve certainly taken a load off my mind.’
‘You couldn’t have killed Millicent Miles in a brain-storm,’ said Nigel, gazing straightly at Basil Ryle.
‘Yes, I realise that now … Oh, I see. I’m not a madman but I may be a fiend?’ Ryle laughed unconvincingly. ‘You’re a disturbing chap, aren’t you? Only the other night you were saying the scene I had with Millicent pointed to my innocence.’
‘It could point two ways, like most things. A subtle murderer might go to her house and deliberately provoke the scene—we’ve only your word for what happened, and you had the ideal supporting cast—a nosy German girl who could overhear a quarrel, but couldn’t understand English. So the policemen reason, if he was going to kill her, he’d have killed her then, under intolerable provocation; but he didn’t; therefore he’s not likely to have killed her the next day.’
‘That’s all too subtle for me,’ said Ryle; then, with sudden, half-humorous pugnacity, ‘Now for God’s sake run away and talk to somebody else. I’ve got work to do.’
Thoughtfully, Nigel made his way along the passage towards the stairs. There was something at the back of his mind, just out of reach; it would have to wait, whatever it was; for there remained the more pressing problem of Arthur Geraldine to be cleared up, and Nigel did not know how best he could deal with it. He realised, too, that he was postponing the show-down with Stephen Protheroe. The worst thing about his job, which he found continuously absorbing, was that he got to like so many of the people it brought him in contact with. And some of them were murderers. And murderers, by and large, tended to be less abominable than their crimes.
At the foot of the stairs he turned round again and marched resolutely back towards Arthur Geraldine’s room. Carefully modulated aggressiveness should be the note. Now look here, Geraldine, do you or don’t you want this proof copy problem solved? Miss Wenham tells me you don’t wish to avail yourself of my services any longer. Very well. But the problem of the proof copy is now all but solved, and I presume you would still care to know the identity of the miscreant. What has hampered my investigations throughout is the refusal of certain persons to admit that they knew Miss Miles in the past—two persons, Geraldine, of whom you are one.
Rehearsing this agreeably theatrical speech brought Nigel to the senior partner’s door. As he opened it, he was almost driven back by a cloud of smoke and a wave of stuffy warmth. The room, he soon deduced, was not on fire—or, if it was, the persons sitting at the long table were taking it remarkably calmly: six prepossessing young gentlemen, equally distinguished in dress and in feature, all smoking away like fury. Nigel’s catarrh and sinus trouble had deprived him of his sense of smell. At the head of the table, Arthur Geraldine looked round.
‘Oh, good morning, Strangeways. Anything urgent? I’ve got this travellers’ meeting till lunch. I don’t think you’ve met these gentlemen.’ Courteous as ever, Geraldine performed introductions, the six distinguished-looking persons rising to their feet as one man, and greeting Nigel in turn with a ‘Good morning, sir’—a ceremony somewhat marred by Liz Wenham, who breezed in at that moment, exclaimed, ‘My God, what an appalling fug!’ and threw open the nearest window.
From the foot of the long table, Stephen Prothereoe winked at Nigel.
‘These gentlemen,’ pronounced the senior partner with considerable grandeur, ‘are the spearhead of the firm’s fortunes—our panzer brigade. They not only travel hopefully, they also arrive.’
A gratified murmur from the panzer brigade greeted this trope, and they sat down again as one man. Overcome by a mounting sense of unreality, Nigel made his excuses and left the conference. Arthur Geraldine’s public manner was so different from his easy, unbuttoned private one. Climbing the stairs, Nigel reflected upon the paradoxical Anglo-Irish alternations of boisterousness and ceremoniousness, hauteur and horse-play, glibness and reticence.
Alone in Stephen Protheroe’s room, he flipped through a few papers, stared out of the window, glanced in at the room where Millicent Miles had met her death, empty now except for the table and one chair. It was odd to think of her and Stephen working next door to each other all those weeks, with nothing between them but a sliding window and a dead bastard. Or had Paul Protheroe been legitimised? Nigel rang Somerset House. After a few minutes’ delay his friend came to the telephone: no, there was no record of a marriage between Stephen Protheroe and Millicent Miles, either before or after Paul Protheroe’s birth. Whoever had registered the birth must have given a false name for the child’s mother, in the interests of respectablity; unless, of course, there had been two Millicents in Stephen’s past—a possibility too discouraging to contemplate. As far as Nigel’s informant knew, there had been no other inquiries recently about this birth certificate.
At a loose end now, Nigel began to poke about in the drawers of Stephen Protheroe’s desk. One of them was locked. Unable to find a key in any of the other drawers, Nigel set to work and picked the lock. Presumably the police had searched this desk some days ago; yet Nigel felt a certain tension as he worked. The drawer did not contain a razor, goloshes, bloodstained clothing. But it was not empty; Nigel saw a litter of paper—loose sheets, some of them yellowish with age, all of them dusty. He took them out. Beneath them he found a book; it was Fire and Ash, the poet Protheroe’s onl
y living child.
There had been many other children, though—born dead or strangled at birth, weaklings, monstrosities. The loose papers under which Fire and Ash was buried proved to be work-sheets of poems. It did not take Nigel long to discover that they were unpublished poems, not earlier versions of those which had appeared in Fire and Ash. They were undated; but it seems probable they had been composed after the publication of that book—why should Stephen preserve juvenilia written before 1927?
As he studied the work-sheets, Nigel had a recurrence of the feeling experienced in Cyprian Gleed’s flat—a feeling compounded of pity, embarrassment and shuddering distaste; the drawer from which he had taken these sheets was a mausoleum of dead ends. There were dozens and dozens of poems, hatched and crossed-hatched with alternatives in Stephen’s neat, spidery writing, and not a single one of them was finished. The emotional conflagration which had produced his masterpiece must have suffocated Stephen’s genius beneath the weight of its own ashes. These MS. poems were lifeless. For all his technical skill, Stephen had been unable to infuse them even with the similitude of life. Nigel imagined him beginning each new one with ever-diminishing confidence, working his way painfully towards some half-glimpsed objective, then losing sight of it, losing touch, losing interest.
Replacing the pitiable fragments in the drawer, Nigel turned with relief to Fire and Ash. It was not the first time he had re-read it during the last ten days, but it had lost none of its impact through familiarity: lines rose up again and jolted him under the heart with sickening violence and precision. A raw, harsh work, tracing a man’s love for a woman through all the stages from passionate faith to savage disillusionment—critics had compared it, when first it was published, to Modern Love—this sequence moved, without pity or self-pity, to its tragic close. Great images of love and lust, of innocence, betrayal, hatred and despair flared up from the pages, shedding a light ever colder and more relentless upon the human situation, so that the man and woman in the poem were dwarfed by the lengthening shadows of their destiny.
End of Chapter Page 16
