The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  “My art, and my comforts,” she composedly replied.

  “You have a right to. You’re good.” He jerked his little, round head sideways at the others. “She’s very good. I, Walt Barn, am telling you: so let’s have a few moments’ silence to mark our appreciation of a great artist.” Ignoring his own request, he sprang up like a jack-in-the-box and addressed Nigel. “Are you one of this lady’s comforts?”

  “Yes.”

  “A pity,” remarked the young painter gloomily. “I could fancy a slice of her myself.”

  “You stick to your painting, Mr. Barn,” said Clare. “You’ve got something.”

  “Do you honestly think so?” His clowning slipped like a mask. “You’ve seen my work?”

  “Yes. But those muddy tones—you’ll never get anywhere with them. It’s not the way you see things. Come now, is it?”

  “By God, I believe you’re right!” he muttered after a long, agonised pause. “But how the devil could you know?”

  “I didn’t. Till I met you.”

  Walter Barn plumped himself down at her feet again. “Oh, man! What a moment in Barn’s life! The scales fall from his eyes. No more mud, says Massinger. Well, what do you know?” He fell silent, awed by the revelation. Even the glass of whisky which Rebecca had put on the floor beside him went unnoticed.

  During these exchanges Dr. Piers had made no attempt to conceal his distaste for the young man or his displeasure at Rebecca’s having brought him in. He sat stiffly upright in his wing chair, hands folded, eyes closed, dissociating himself from the conversation—like a delicate, ivory figurine, an idol temporarily forgotten. But, seeing the clasped hands quivering, Nigel wondered if it were just because Dr. Piers must always be the centre of attention that he was now disgruntled, was positively sulking. Or had he some graver reason for detesting Walter Barn? At least he had not made a scene and ordered this unwelcome visitor out of the house.

  James and Harold were now standing together in a far corner of the room, talking in undertones. From the way their eyes glanced discreetly from their father to their sister, Nigel gathered they must be talking about Dr. Piers’s attitude towards Rebecca and her impossible young man. James had a stiff, outraged expression on his heavy features. Harold appeared to be agreeing with him, but in a distrait manner as though he had more important things on his mind.

  Graham Loudron had come to perch on the arm of the sofa beside Sharon.

  “I’ll be getting that record for you in a few days,” he said.

  “Good. I can hardly wait.” She turned to Nigel on her other side. “Graham’d be the tops as a jazz pianist if he wasn’t so lazy. He used to play with Lew Lindy’s band.”

  “Which Mr. Strangeways has never heard of.”

  Nigel admitted ignorance.

  “Which do you like best—rock? bop? classical jazz? No. You’re a thirties type, aren’t you? It’d be the blues.”

  Going over to the piano, he started playing “St. James Infirmary.” But after a minute he slid into “Frankie and Johnnie”, of which he gave a scintillating but unnerving performance, for he distorted each successive stanza of the ballad into a different rhythm, from the proper one to a waltz, then to a tango, then a fox-trot, then a stony, stunning rock beat, and so on, but always returning to the original rhythm for the refrain. He stopped in the middle of a bar.

  “Period music,” he said, leaving the piano.

  “I don’t dig it,” said Walter Barn.

  “The new barbarism,” Dr. Piers remarked. “It’s the sign of ultimate decadence when the civilised start aping the savage.” He spoke for some minutes, with elegant and mordant satire, about what he called “the cult of the tough,” “the worship of the morally and intellectually muscle-bound.” Before he had finished, a querulous note had crept into the old man’s voice; but it was a mark of his authority, rather than a concession to his age, that no one in the room ventured to dispute his argument.

  “Well, I can’t help it,” said Rebecca into the ensuing silence. “I like an old-fashioned waltz better than anything.”

  “Good for you, ducks,” remarked Walter. “The old-time fragrance. You’re a lavender-and-coffee-lace girl. That’s what they think. But we know better, don’t we?” He gave her a smacking kiss.

  “Mother used to play waltzes—on that very piano,” said James Loudron. “D’you remember, Becky, how we used to caper round? pretend we were at a ball?”

  “Yes,” said his sister. “And then one day she locked the piano and never played it again.”

  “She played a lot of wrong notes, I expect,” said Harold, “but I was too young to know.”

  “She didn’t have Graham’s—er—dexterity. But——”

  “But she played, no doubt,” said Graham softly, “with intense feeling.”

  James Loudron’s large hands clenched, and he looked dangerous.

  “Ah, yes,” their father interposed, his old voice thin and sad as the last of many echoes. “Yes. Janet was a woman of feeling,”

  CHAPTER III

  Missing from his Home

  THREE DAYS LATER, Clare opened the front door to let in Em swathed by a coiling ectoplasm of fog.

  “You shouldn’t have bothered to come in this, Em.”

  “Anything to get out of me own house. My old man’s been sitting about best part of three days now, wearing out his fanny. No work, see, not with the fog. Lighterman’s disease, he’s got. Constipation. All that stuff piling up at the wharf, and he can’t unload. Proper foul temper he’s in. Don’t know how you can stand having him”— Em jerked her thumb up in the direction of Nigel’s study—“mooning about here all day. Ain’t natural.”

  Em divested herself of several coats and mufflers, entered the studio and cast her usual unillusioned look at the Female Nude.

  “You aren’t half taking a time at that,” she said.

  “It’s slow work.”

  “Well, you know best. What happens when it’s finished?”

  “I exhibit it. In a gallery.”

  Em chuckled phlegmily. “She’s making an exhibition of herself, if you ask me. I wouldn’t half catch it if my old man found me like that. Before ’e’d turned the light off, I mean. Well, I must do me stairs. Funny thing about Dr. Piers, ain’t it?”

  “Dr. Piers?”

  “What? Didn’t you know?”—Em, in the manner of her kind, assumed that gossip arrived everywhere at the same moment. “He’s scarpered.”

  “Run away?”

  “Well, he’s not there, anyway. They comes down to breakfast yesterday, and he’s disappeared. Not in his room. Not in the house nowhere. That Dr. James was trying to hush it up like, but my niece Joan who cleans for them—she heard him and Miss Rebecca arguing about it. She was for telling the cops, but he said no, maybe their dad had had a call—you know, emergency—and didn’t have time to leave a message. But that was yesterday morning, and he’s still not back. Joan said Dr. James said his dad might have had magnesia.”

  Em favoured Clare with the blank expression she always put on when she was trying out her comic-Cockney-char turn. Clare had been caught out once, and she was not buying it again.

  “Amnesia, presumably?”

  “That’s right,” said Em. “Joan’s an ignorant piece. Just what would amnesia mean?”

  “Loss of memory,” said Nigel, who had just entered. The situation was explained to him.

  “How do you get this amnesia?” Em asked.

  “A knock on the head. Or a long period of acute strain—mental strain. Most of the people reported as missing are suffering from amnesia.”

  “You mean,” said Em shrewdly, “they’re taking a sort of rest-cure from themselves?”

  “That’s just about it.”

  Em pondered a moment. “Can’t see the old doc doing that. To look at, you’d think you could blow him away like a cobweb: but he’s tough as they come.”

  “It’s often the tough who crack up, Em. No resilience. Too rigid. Can’t le
t up on themselves.”

  “Well, I don’t rightly know about that, sir. But I remember when that little old Hitler started his blitzes, Dr. Piers used to be out all day and night—we had it bad round here—saved hundreds of lives, I reckon. When we was bombed out—that was when my poor old dad got his—Dr. Piers turned up before the dust had settled, bandaged us up, took mum to the hospital, bedded us kids down in his own house—I was fifteen then. Bloody marvel, that man was. Night after night he’d be there, going into burning houses, crawling about under the rubble. They all said it was like he didn’t care whether he lived or died. My dad was on the Heavy Rescue before he got his lot: I remember him telling us he was at an incident, and Dr. Piers was there, and another bomb fell and the blast blew the doctor right across the street up against a lamp-post. Well, they picked him up and told him to go off home and have a kip. ‘No, boys,’ says Dr. Piers, ‘I can’t sleep nowadays. Let’s get on with it!’ White as a ghost he looked, my dad said; and sad—sort of blue look on his face as if nothing couldn’t do no more to him. Well,” Em turned away with a gusty sigh, “I must get out me vacuum. Time and tide wait for no man. But I tell you this—if anyone done anything to old Dr. Piers, ’e better clear out of these parts quick or ’e’ll find himself hung out to dry in someone’s back yard.”

  Nigel and Clare talked about it in a desultory way over lunch. It was difficult to reconcile Em’s picture of Dr. Piers as the desperate hero with the urbane, cultivated, frail, rather tyrannical old man they had met at dinner three nights ago. But crisis could bring out an alter ego; and twenty years was long enough to obliterate it again. Certainly, at dinner, they had not been conscious of any suppressed strain in the old man which might have caused a sudden amnesia: tension there had been, but distributed evenly—or so it seemed—over his oddly-assorted family.

  “The one queer thing,” said Nigel, “is that he should have made such a point, at a family gathering, of bringing out my interest in crime. It was somehow not quite in character with his—his kind of fastidiousness.”

  “And what may we infer from that, my darling old muck-raker? You’re surely not suggesting that he was putting you forward as the man to be consulted if some such problem arose? He could hardly know that he was going to have an attack of amnesia and walk out on them.”

  “No. But——” Nigel broke off. “Ah well, as my old tutor used to say, speculation in this field is idle. I wonder will any of them come to me.”

  “It won’t be Dr. James, anyway. If he can’t hush it up, he’ll do everything through the regulation channels. But why should he try and hush it up?”

  “The practice. One little puff of scandal, and patients start going elsewhere. Graham Loudron might.”

  “Consult you? Young fruit-bat? Why?”

  “He’s inquisitive. He’s the type, I suspect, who enjoys setting the cat among the pigeons. And he doesn’t like me—he’d get a kick out of seeing me fall down on the job.”

  “I think he’s rather pathetic.”

  “I think he’s rather bloody-minded. How long has he been living there?”

  “According to Em, Dr. Piers adopted him about ten years ago. He was an orphan. His mother was dead, and his father—who’d been Dr. Piers’s closest friend—was killed in the war.”

  “But Dr. Piers waited till 1950 to adopt him?”

  “Presumably his mother was alive till then. What about Harold? I didn’t have any talk with him after dinner.”

  “I’m not sure about Harold. I don’t go much for the City smoothie type. He’s quite agreeable. But I’d say he was out for Number One every time, which includes that expensive wife of his.”

  “Expensive?”

  “Her clothes cost a lot. And drugs don’t come cheap.”

  “Drugs! How do you know?”

  “She told me. Unwittingly, of course. The question is, would Harold be anxious about his father? Anxious enough to come and consult me? He’d something on his mind that night. At a guess, I’d say he would come if it was thoroughly inconvenient for him for his father to be missing.”

  “In other words?”

  “If, for example, his business—whatever it is—was badly in the red, and he needed a large loan, without interest.”

  “Well, I must say, that’s a low view to take of a harmless young man.”

  “Speculation, in his field, can be a good deal worse than idle. There’s the telephone.”

  It was neither Harold nor Graham Loudron speaking. Rebecca Loudron asked if she might bring Walter Barn that evening and have a talk with Nigel.

  “So much,” remarked Clare when she had given him the message, “for Mr. Nigel Know-all Strangeways.”

  They received their visitors in the studio, at one end of which were comfortable chairs and a cosy-stove. The fog, seeping in, slightly blurred the hard outlines of Clare’s Female Nude, round which Walt Barn began to circulate in the obsessive manner of a dog inspecting a lamp-post, the moment he entered. Whether it was her well-cut tweeds, or the presence of emergency, or merely the absence of her father, Rebecca Loudron looked more mature, more integrated.

  “It’s very good of you to let us come, Mr. Strangeways.”

  “Not a bit. Have some Armagnac with your coffee. Warm you up.”

  “Thank you, perhaps I will. How beautifully warm your studio is, though. Our house has been quite perishing since this fog started. It really needs central heating. But Papa never seems to feel the cold. Walter, do stop prowling round that statue.”

  “First things first, Becky love.” Walter Barn was lying on the floor, gazing upwards at the rear elevation of the towering figure. Leaping to his feet, he smoothed the air behind it with his hand. “Nice job, Miss Massinger. Very nice. But I’m not sure about this plane here. Won’t you have to modify it a bit in relation to——?”

  “Oh, Walt! Do please attend!” There was exasperation, but something like tearfulness too, in Rebecca’s voice.

  Walter came over at once, and taking the glass of Armagnac Nigel offered him, sat down on the arm of Rebecca’s chair.

  “I honestly don’t know if we ought to bother you with this,” she said. “James wouldn’t approve, I’m sure. But I can’t just sit about doing nothing. And after what you told us at dinner—I mean——”

  “They’ve mislaid their dad,” said Walter.

  “Yes, I know,” Clare put in soothingly. “We heard about it from Em, our char.”

  “You see, Papa’s never done this before—just going off without telling anyone. There are his patients. Of course, James can manage them for a bit. But——”

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” said Nigel gently. By tactful questioning, he elicited Rebecca’s story.

  Yesterday morning she had brought her father’s breakfast on a tray to his bedroom, as she normally did, at nine o’clock. He was not there. She went into his study, then called out for him on each floor of the house, but got no answer. She thought he must have gone out early on an emergency call, though she had not heard the house telephone. However, at ten o’clock Dr. Piers’s secretary, Miss Anson, had come in from the annexe, where he and Dr. James had their consulting rooms, to say that two of Dr. Piers’s patients were waiting: he had not yet come into the consulting-room this morning, Miss Anson said. James Loudron had already gone out on his rounds, so Rebecca went to look for Graham, whom she found at breakfast in the dining-room.

  “I told him Papa couldn’t be found. Graham said, ‘Oh nonsense. He’s probably overslept for once.’ I said he wasn’t in his bedroom, I’d looked. Well, Graham and I hunted through every room in the house. Then I thought I’d look in the bedroom again. Papa sleeps on the mezzanine floor, above the annexe. His bedroom and bathroom are the only rooms on that floor. Of course, he wasn’t there. Then Graham said we’d better just try the bathroom, in case Papa had fainted in the bath or something. So he went through the bedroom into the bathroom, and then he called out, ‘He’s not here.’ It gave me quite a shock. I suppose I�
�d keyed myself up to finding him there. By this time Graham was terribly worried. So we got Miss Anson to phone round and contact James and tell him to come home,” Rebecca smiled wryly. “Poor Papa. He loathed that word ‘contact’.”

  James Loudron had at first pooh-poohed the idea that anything was wrong. But, when his father was still absent eight hours later, he rang the police. The sergeant who came after dinner went straight to the point. He asked them if any hand-luggage was missing. They went up to the box-room with him. All Dr. Piers’s bags and suitcases and their own, were still there. So it did not look as if the old doctor had gone off on a journey. His car was in the garage, and a telephone inquiry to the station, where he was well-known, confirmed that he had not taken a train. The sergeant next asked them to look through Dr. Piers’s clothes. Here, they were in some difficulty; for their father was a dressy man and had a large number of suits, and none of his children could be sure whether or no one of these was missing. The suit he had worn at dinner the previous night was folded neatly on a chair in the bedroom, with shirt, underclothes, socks and evening slippers to hand, just as the old man had taken them off when he retired early after dinner, saying that he felt sleepy. The only garment of his which they could identify with certainty as missing was a thick Connemara-tweed overcoat of a distinctive black-and-white pattern.

  “Of course he must have taken a suit,” said Walter now. “He’d not have walked out into this bloody fog wearing nothing but an overcoat.”

  Throughout this recital Nigel had been sitting, gazing non-committally down his nose and apparently quite relaxed, even when he asked Rebecca some pertinent question to fill out the picture. In fact, he was giving the concentrated attention, both to fact and to nuances of tone, which was one of his most formidable powers as an investigator. Clare said, smiling at Rebecca:

  “Strangeways is a human tape-recorder, you know. Every word you’ve said is now printed on his mind.”

  Rebecca gave a nervous laugh. “Oh, I wish I could do something,” she cried.

  “You can. There’s one thing that seems to have been overlooked,” said Nigel.