The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  “What’s that?”

  “The diary. At dinner the other night your father told us he’d started to keep a diary. It might tell us why he has disappeared.”

  “Oh, yes! I never thought of that.” Rebecca’s large brown eyes were staring intensely at Nigel. “I’ll start looking for it to-morrow.”

  “Let me get this clear in my mind. You say your father felt sleepy and retired to bed about 8.45 p.m. This was unusually early for him?”

  “Yes. He generally stayed up till 10.30 at least.”

  “Did he seem worried at dinner? Absent-minded? Jumpy? In any way not his usual self?”

  There was a slight pause. Then Rebecca said, “The sergeant asked us that. And the inspector who came yesterday. And, well——” she broke off. Nigel was aware of Walter Barn’s bright blue eyes fixed almost hypnotically upon her.

  “Why do you hesitate?” he prompted.

  “Well, we didn’t seem to agree. I mean, I thought Papa was distrait at dinner. But James said he thought he was sulking; and Graham said his impression was that Papa was waiting for something.”

  “Waiting?”

  “Yes. I know it sounds odd. ‘Waiting for something to happen,’ Graham said. He couldn’t explain it to the police better than that.”

  “It happened all right,” said Walter, making Rebecca visibly wince.

  “And that was the last any of you saw or heard of him—when he went up to his bedroom?”

  “Yes. I wouldn’t have heard anything, anyway. I was in my room—it’s on the top floor—playing gramophone records. And James had to go out immediately after dinner to a confinement.” Rebecca related this rapidly, in her rather monotonous voice, as though reciting a lesson she had learnt by heart—as she probably had, thought Nigel, after two interviews with the police.

  “And Graham?” he asked.

  “He didn’t hear anything, either. He was pottering about in his room. It’s on the first floor.” A strange expression fleeted over her face. “It used to be Mother’s.”

  Rising, Nigel gave them some more Armagnac. “Well, I don’t honestly think I can do much to help at this stage. The police will have put their organisation to work: they notify hospitals and so on about persons missing. The main thing is to find that diary.”

  “There is one thing you might be able to tell us about.” Walter Barn’s round head, the shaggy hair falling in a fringe over his brow, looked like a lichen-covered stone ball on a gate post. “The money. What are the arrangements over the money?”

  “Household expenses, you mean? I suppose Dr. James will get power of attorney, if his father’s absence is at all protracted.”

  “Look. I’m just a blunt, proletarian painter. Pardon if my vulgar mind’s showing; but if the old man never does turn up, when is the loot distributed?”

  Even Rebecca looked rather shocked at this brashness, and Walter evidently felt the antipathy he had aroused. It made him the more aggressive. “It’s all very well for you people, rolling in it, to turn up your delicate noses when money is mentioned. It’s a dirty word—I know, I know. Just tell that to a family of six, like mine was, living in two rooms——”

  “Walt! Please! This really isn’t necessary.”

  “Shut up, woman! Don’t you want to get married?”

  Nigel interposed firmly. “When a person disappears, his will cannnot be proved till the lawyers have established presumption of death. There’s no reason whatsoever for supposing that Miss Loudron’s father is——”

  “Got all the answers, hasn’t he, Becky?” Walter grinned at her. “Well then, Strangeways, if—just if—the old boy doesn’t show up again, how long does it take to establish this whatchermaycallit?”

  “A period of seven years has to elapse, I believe.”

  “Years? Jesus Christ!”

  “A great deal of investigation has to be done.”

  “So he could keep Becky on the bread-line long after he’s dead? That’d be like him.”

  The young woman’s eyes were suffused with tears. She tried to speak, but her voice failed and she could only gaze at Walter imploringly. He disregarded it.

  “All right. I wanted to marry Becky. He couldn’t stand me at any price. Fair enough. I make barely enough to live on by myself. Her dad told her, if she married me, he’d stop her allowance—and a right miserable allowance it is, too. What riles me is that the old man should be able to vanish into thin air—if you can call this bloody fog thin air—and still keep her on a ball and chain like he’s done all her life. I don’t see what’s wrong in——”

  “There’s nothing wrong in taking thought for the future,” Clare cut in, her high, light voice like drops of ice. The sight of Rebecca, openly weeping now, had broken her own self-control. “What’s wrong is belly-aching about all this and making Rebecca miserable at the very time she needs your sympathy and support most.”

  “Huh! The women getting together,” Walter jeered.

  “Don’t talk like an oaf!”

  “I’m talking honestly. We don’t wrap things up in Cellophane—not where I come from.”

  Clare’s eyes blazed. Her long black hair swirled like smoke on a gusty day as she turned upon him. “To hell with where you come from! Do you think there’s some virtue in bad manners arid moronic insensitivity? Does your being working-class give you a permit to behave like a bloody-minded little clown? No, you wait, young Walt Barn, I’ve not finished with you! People like you make me sick. You boast of your poverty and your slum origins: you behave as if they give you a divine dispensation from showing ordinary human decency. I’m just a plain, blunt proletarian painter, so I don’t have to think about anyone else’s feelings. Van Gogh was uncouth, Van Gogh was a genius, therefore I’ll show them I’m a genius by behaving uncouthly. Lovely logic, isn’t it? Exhibitionism as the short cut to success, eh?”

  “Here, I never——”

  Clare galloped on over him. “The trouble with you and your lot is that you don’t have any values except success. That’s why you’ll do anything for publicity—and when you get it, you can’t take it, it goes to your heads. You’re just a rabble of overgrown Peter Pans posturing as rough-hewn geniuses or noble martyrs to society. You yourself can at least paint. But you’ll never make a good painter till you’ve learnt that the artist must be anonymous. So for God’s sake stop splashing your virility over everyone and keep it for your canvases.”

  Clare paused, if only to regain breath.

  “How dare you talk to Walter like that!” cried Rebecca. “How dare you!”

  “Take it easy, old girl. I can defend myself,” said Walter. He turned to Nigel with a rueful grin. “Proper spitfire you’ve got there. Haven’t had such a dressing-down since mum found me in the back-yard with the local tart. Mind you, I wouldn’t take all that from any old stone-chipper. But Clare Massinger has a right to talk. And she’s talked a fair bit of sense, I reckon. I’m sorry if I upset you, Becky love: but next time I do, just throw the kitchen stove at me, like Miss Massinger here.”

  When they had left, a few minutes later, Nigel mopped his brow. “Good for you, Clare. But it was hot while it lasted.”

  “I hope I wasn’t too rough on him. He’s not a bad sort. He took it pretty well, I must say.”

  “Yes,” said Nigel, a bit dubiously. He had seen, what Clare had been too wound-up to notice, a very ugly glint in the mercurial Walt Barn’s eye at one point of her tirade.

  CHAPTER IV

  A Wind from the North-East

  SIX DAYS LATER—it was a Saturday—Nigel awoke early with the vague sensation that some change had occurred since he went to sleep. His attention focused drowsily upon the curtains. They were no longer, as they had been every morning for over a week, grey-black rectangles backed by the blanketing fog outside: they glowed, and a strip of dazzling gold showed between them. Getting up, he parted them and looked out. Sunlight. Trees in the park waving their branches. A clear, cold, grey-blue sky. The claustrophobic hood of fog had b
een lifted away during the night by a wind that was tugging straight in his direction the white ensign over the Naval College. A north-easter.

  Dressing quietly so as not to waken Clare, he went out. High up the hill here, the wind drilled into his right eye and numbed the cheekbone below it. Presently he was passing the Loudrons’ house. In the sunlight, the white paint of its windows and noble portico looked as if they had just been hosed down. Whatever its secret might be, the house was keeping it: no trace of its owner had been discovered since he disappeared eight days ago; not even the diary which might have explained the aberration, the despair, the stratagem—whatever it was that had taken him out to be swallowed up alive in the fog.

  Alive? One had to presume so. The local D.D.I., with whom Nigel had got in touch through the medium of Chief Detective-Inspector Wright at Scotland Yard, assured him that they had given No. 6 a discreet going-over, and there was no evidence whatsoever of its owner’s having left the house dead. Radio and newspaper appeals had produced the usual crop of eye-witnesses who claimed to have seen Dr. Piers Loudron in a variety of places, from Deptford to Barrow-in-Furness, and the usual handful of harmless lunatics who eagerly confessed to having murdered him. These had all been sieved out, and nothing material was left in the mesh. If indeed he had suffered an attack of amnesia, he would probably be dead by now—of starvation; for his wallet was in the pocket of the suit he had taken off that night, he had drawn no money from a bank since his disappearance, and no hospitals or casual wards had taken him in.

  He might just conceivably have been kidnapped. But why? And why should the kidnappers remain silently undemanding?

  The local police, faced by this blind wall of negatives, were inclined to think that he must have left the house that night and fallen, either accidentally or on purpose, into the river. The Connemara-tweed overcoat was, after all, missing; and it was not altogether inconceivable that, in a state of mental derangement, the old man should put on no other clothing to walk out of the house to his death. Late at night or in the early hours of the morning, the fog being so thick, he could easily have got to the river, three minutes’ walk from his house, unobserved. But the fog, clamped down on the river day after day, had prevented any effective testing of this theory.

  As Nigel strode into the High Road, the clock on St. Alfege’s church said twenty-five past seven. Unconsciously he quickened his pace. The river seemed to be drawing him towards it. The bodies of the drowned, made buoyant by the gases of their putrefaction, rise slowly to float on the surface again after six to ten days. It was now the eighth day since Dr. Piers Loudron had vanished, and the first of clear visibility.

  All the way down the hill Nigel had been hearing the steam whistles of ships, released from the fog’s thrall, making their way upstream or downstream round the U-bend of the Isle of Dogs. As he turned left out of Nelson Parade, he saw the derricks, mast, high bridge structure and funnel of a vessel sliding past the pier. High tide, or something near it. The air thrummed with a vibration of many engines, and was impregnated with familiar river-smells—diesel oil, mud, tar, rotting detritus, chemical fumes—a sour amalgam of smells blown inland by the wind, which had a taste of salt in it too. The pier turnstile gates would be padlocked still. Nigel walked past the great brown-black hull of the Cutty Sark, under the towering tracery of its three masts and rigging, on to the railed space to the left of the pier. Early workers were pouring into the domed building which housed the lift that would take them down to the tunnel beneath the Thames: they would push their bicycles along its quarter-mile of white-tiled walls, while tugs, coasters, cargo-liners thrashed their way overhead.

  Leaning on the rail and looking left, Nigel watched a huge, blue-funnelled Swedish cargo-liner, in ballast, being manœuvred away from its moorings opposite Deptford creek by two Sun class tugs, whose raked smoke-stacks and squat hulls, dwarfed by the Swede’s tremendous hulk, gave them a prissy, self-important air. Hugging the far bank to avoid the full thrust of the ebb, three deep-waisted Dutch family ships followed one another up-river, their motors pulsing heavily. The wash of passing vessels slopped lumps of water up the stone steps between Nigel and the domed building, from which Graham Loudron at this moment emerged and walked rapidly away. What could the young man have been doing across the river at this hour of the morning? Nigel wondered.

  He himself now moved off towards the Naval College. In the right-angle formed by the river wall beyond the pier, an old man was leaning over the iron railing and gazing lugubriously down at the water. Nigel stopped beside him. The water was covered with a sluggishly-heaving carpet of debris, driven here by the north-east wind—packing-cases, bales of hay, tins of polish, halves of grape-fruit, a dead cat, a gym-shoe, a motor tyre, and thousands of pieces of wood; timbers big enough to have been the stern-posts of vanished sailing ships, planks from Scandinavian saw-mills, a mass of smaller lengths like kindling wood, all jostled together in a sort of flexuous, sodden mosaic which, like oil on water, subdued the waves made by passing ships and by the wind blowing diagonally across the tide.

  “All that wood,” said the lugubrious man, spitting copiously into it. “Floats down the river. Then it floats up again. Backwards and forwards. Year after year. Makes you think, guv, don’t it?”

  “What I can’t understand,” said Nigel, “is why the whole river isn’t blocked by it, like pack-ice. Where does all the rest of the wood go? Year after year, for centuries, people have been chucking wood into the river; it’s been falling off ships and barges, floating out from wharves. And it doesn’t sink for ages. It ought to have choked up the river long ago.”

  “Time,” remarked his companion, “like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away.”

  “Yes, but——”

  “Funny tricks this old river plays,” said the man, sucking his moustache. “Bloke I knew, years ago, got knocked in one night, making fast a German ship at Grunton’s Wharf. Couldn’t swim. ’E just went under, like a bit of bleeding pig-iron. Grunton’s Wharf’s on this side of the river, beyond the power station”—the old man pointed east. “Now, guv, where d’you reckon they’d find the corpse?”

  Nigel gave the problem his full attention. “Depends what the state of the tide was when he fell in.”

  “Top of the ebb. Like now, as it might be.”

  “Well, I suppose the ebb might pull him out, along the river bottom. But the current round the Isle of Dogs has a strong southerly thrust at the bend there, so he’d be bound to get pushed back to this bank, wouldn’t he?”

  “That’s what you’d think,” replied the old man with relish. “But they found him, couple of weeks later, over there.” He jerked his head towards the Luralda Wharf, on the far side of the river. “Nobody couldn’t account for it. Might’ve been an eddy—he could have got into the outflow from the power station. Some said suction.”

  “Suction?”

  “Screws of all them vessels passing. Pull you out towards them, see? Mash you up too. Old Bert was mashed up something horrible.”

  “In the midst of life, we are in death.”

  “You bloody said it, guv.” His faded eyes gazed dreamily at Nigel. “Ah. Old Father Thames. ’E’s sly all right. You’ve got to watch him. Mate of mine—he was master of a tug——”

  After hearing another mortuary reminiscence, Nigel bade the old longshoreman good-morning and walked on past the Naval College, its grey stone gleaming in the sunshine, to the far end of the esplanade. Here, in the shallow inlet by the Trafalgar Tavern, another carpet of flotsam sullenly heaved. On the black wall beneath the building a high-water mark showed—only two feet below the little balcony of the central ground-floor window. It occurred to Nigel that, at high water, a body could be put into the river from such a window with hardly a splash. Gazing unseeingly at the wooden jetty of the Curlew rowing club, he did a sum in his head. High water to-day was at about 6 a.m. On the night Dr. Piers Loudron had disappeared, high tide must have been around 10 p.m.; and by 11 p.m. the ebb
would have been running strongly.

  He walked round the back of the Trafalgar Tavern, along Crane Street, past Holy Trinity Hospital—the seventeenth century alms-house over whose toy-like façade towered the chimneys of the power station; then under the clattering conveyers of the power station, through a scrap-iron yard, to emerge again on the river front opposite the Cutty Sark pub. At a wharf just beyond, partly hidden by a wall, a green flag with “Wreck” lettered upon it fluttering from the mast, lay a Thames sailing-barge. This must be the one which Harold Loudron had bought some years ago. Nigel peered round the wall, from which the bows of the barge projected. The bulwarks were broken off in places. A section of the deck planking amidships was gone, revealing a turgid compost of mud and water in the hold. The wheel, unlashed, made half turns as the waves thumped the great rudder, whose banging was answered by a kind of hollow, distant thunder, like the sound of the skittle game in Rip Van Winkle, as the swell bumped together a row of empty lighters moored side by side at Lovell’s Wharf.

  Just beyond this barge, there showed the roof and upper story of a house, the rest concealed by the high wall. A door in the wall gave access to it: the front of the house must be right over the river. “Between the Cutty Sark pub and Lovell’s Wharf,” Harold Loudron had told him. It was certainly a strange place for the Loudrons to live in—the dapper young City gent and his exotic, restless wife—here amongst the racket of riveting, the grime from the power-station, the hissing roar of oxy-acetylene burners in the scrap-yard. They had the pub handy, and a glorious view down the reach past the Isle of Dogs. But otherwise the situation seemed quite out of character for both of them. No doubt, thought Nigel, it had seemed “amusing” at first: a new sensation for Sharon; and of course they got a rent-free house—it had belonged to Harold’s mother: but the novelty must have worn off pretty soon.

  Sirens blew from across the Thames. Eight o’clock. Nigel began to retrace his steps, hungry for breakfast. From Ballast Quay he saw a police launch on patrol approaching up-river from the direction of the West India docks, a white moustache of foam bristling at its bows. He came out again on the esplanade by the Trafalgar Tavern. A white-hulled Spanish steamer, of graceful outlines, was gliding eastwards. Between this vessel and the shore, a pack of seagulls screamed and skidded in the air, circling over some debris. As Nigel took out his field-glasses and began to focus them, the police launch emerged from behind a collier unloading at the power-house jetty, and its bows lifted to the acceleration of its powerful engine. The river police had seen what Nigel too was looking at now, clear in the circle of his binoculars—the thing he had not come out this early morning with the least expectation of seeing, yet which, the moment he set eyes on it, made him feel that it had been waiting for him all these days to come out and find it, directing his steps this way like a destiny—a hulk of flesh, waterlogged and dirty-white, screamed over by gulls, lumbering and sliding with other flotsam on the choppy river.