The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  The launch stopped on the leeward side of the body, obscuring Nigel’s view. On its after-deck, behind the cabin, two policemen got busy, one with a boat-hook, the other with a coil of rope. Wind and tide swinging the launch round, Nigel was shortly able to observe their catch. As it was hauled aboard, the rope noosed beneath its arms, the torso stood upright for a moment on the water. Decay and long immersion had bloated the face almost out of recognition, giving it a negroid appearance: the swollen tongue protruded from blubber lips in a grimace: the ruined eyes were smears of white. Only the silver-white of hair and beard suggested that this could be the remains of the elegant, vivacious Dr. Piers Loudron.

  The policemen hauled again, their faces tight with repugnance. As the body slid over the gunwale, Nigel saw that it had no legs. The policemen laid it on deck, putting a tarpaulin over it, and the launch kicked into full speed.

  Nigel took a few steps homeward; then, on an impulse, turned round and hurried back towards Harold Loudron’s house. The door in the wall was not locked. He passed through, across a small yard; hammered on the front door, rang the bell several times. At last Harold Loudron appeared in a cardinal-red dressing gown, his black hair dishevelled.

  “What the devil——? Oh, it’s you. Has something happened?”

  “Can I come in a minute?”

  Harold led the way into a sitting-room, which ran the length of the house, with three tall sash windows overlooking the river. Nigel sat down on a window-seat cushioned with red leather. The room was panelled with birch, unpainted, and at one end of it was a dining alcove divided from the rest by a movable glass partition. Brilliant Mexican mats adorned the pear-wood floor. It all looked singularly like a model for gracious, modernistic living out of an Ideal Homes exhibition, except for the dust which lay thick on rubber-plants, tables and shelves—a general air of tristesse and seediness, which gave it the pathos of a room in an expensive doll’s house neglected by some spoilt child.

  “I think your father has been found,” said Nigel.

  Harold Loudron stared at him a moment, in what looked very like consternation. Then his eyes lit up (artificial lighting? Nigel wondered).

  “Found! Oh, but that’s splendid. Thank God! We were——”

  “I’m sorry. Not alive. I’ve just seen a body taken out of the river. I’m afraid it’s very likely his.”

  “Oh God! How awful!” Harold lit a cigarette shakily: then, remembering his manners, offered his gold case to Nigel and said, “Good of you to tell us. You know, in a way it’s a sort of relief. We’d been worrying terribly. The suspense, you know.”

  A relief it certainly was, of some kind, judging by the relaxation of Harold’s tense body.

  “I thought you might like to ring up your brother straight away—break it to them before the police. Sometimes the police are a bit heavy-handed about——”

  “Yes, of course. I’m really most grateful to——”

  He broke off. Had he been on the point of saying “most grateful to your good self”? The meaningless, vulgar, business-man’s jargon would come naturally to him, thought Nigel.

  “It’s a great shock,” said Harold Loudron. “I can hardly take it in yet. My father was a fine man. Greatly beloved. And so full of life.”

  Harold seemed well launched upon a Rotarian-type oration, which would be more than Nigel could take on an empty stomach.

  “Hadn’t you better telephone?”

  “Quite.” But still Harold made no move. “You say—where did you see—er—the body being——?”

  “Just beyond the Trafalgar Tavern. It had no legs.”

  “What had no legs?” came a husky voice from the door. Sharon had slashed on some lipstick, but her puffy face and bedroom hair were not prepossessing.

  “Darling, you shouldn’t have—Strangeways has very kindly looked in to—you must prepare yourself for a shock, I’m afraid.” Harold dithered round his wife in an uxorious manner that evidently tried her patience.

  “They’ve found him, you mean?” she asked, coughing harshly.

  Nigel told what he had seen. “Of course, I can’t be absolutely certain. But it had white hair and white beard. And it was the right build. We shall know soon.”

  Sharon threw back her tangled red mane from over her eyes.

  “But what’s this about no legs?” she asked.

  “He must have been caught by a ship’s propeller.”

  Sharon took three long, graceful strides to a kidney-shaped chair and sat down.

  “Well, he wouldn’t have felt it.”

  “Sharon! Darling!” Harold protested.

  “Well, he was dead, wasn’t he? Drowned, I mean, before that?”

  “I presume so,” said Nigel. “And drowning is a good deal more painful than——”

  “My wife only meant that she was glad he didn’t suffer—er—from what you say happened later.” Harold spoke quite stuffily. He’s still besotted with this beautiful harpy of his, thought Nigel, glancing out of the window. Waves spanked the river wall directly below it; five or six feet below. A tug, dirty-white foam piled at its blunt bows and four empty lighters in tow, approached up the reach. It hooted four times, then twice.

  “Ninety-degree turn to port,” said Harold absently.

  “Sailor-boy!” Sharon’s voice was mildly satirical. She turned her diminished green eyes upon Nigel. “He’ll run away to sea one day if he isn’t careful.”

  “Well, I’d better go and telephone,” said Harold doubtfully. No one gainsaying him, he went. Sharon at once slipped over to occupy the window-seat beside Nigel. Her wrap fell open and a waft of warm flesh smell came from her.

  “This is going to upset poor old brother James,” she said.

  “Him particularly?”

  “Becky will feel upset. But actually it’ll be a merciful release for her. But James—he’s been shaking in his shoes. The practice. What’ll the patients say? The senior partner committing suicide. Oh dear, oh dear!”

  “What makes you think Dr. Piers committed suicide?”

  “Well, what else could it be?” Her eyes held his in a long, calculating look: there was a sort of excitement in them too. “You don’t mean—what they call ‘foul play ’?”

  “Or accident. Who knows? I see it’ll be awkward for James, though, whatever it turns out to be. And Graham?”

  Her eyes filmed over. “What about him?”

  “Will he be very upset? I got the impression he was the favourite son.”

  “It would take an earthquake to upset young Graham,” she murmured, frowning a little.

  “Which brings us to Harold.”

  “I suppose it does. But what’s all this in aid of? Why should you worry which of us is worried? Not that those anxious wrinkles on your forehead aren’t rather fascinating.”

  “You and Harold will be glad of the money, I imagine.”

  For a moment Nigel thought she was going to claw at his face with those blood-red nails of hers. But she controlled herself, digging them into the palms of her hands instead, and replied in a sort of husky purr:

  “Yes, we shall. For one thing, we can get out of this dreary dump.”

  “You don’t like it? I think it’s rather a romantic house.”

  “So did I, once,” she said bitterly. “Of course, your generation were suckers for romance, weren’t you?”

  Romance? thought Nigel. The distressed areas, the hunger marchers, the new barbarism of tinpot Tamburlaines? “And your lot is clear-eyed, disillusioned, realistic? The I’m-all-right-Jack brigade?”

  “We only live once. Why the hell shouldn’t we enjoy ourselves?”

  “Why not? Only it seems to make you either bored or bad-tempered. But perhaps you enjoy that.”

  Sharon smiled a secret smile, her eyes glittering. She had roused this impassive man: the only antagonism she recognised was sex-antagonism, to her the first sign of sexual interest.

  “Not all the time,” she said. “Tell me, are you a one-woman man?�
��

  “I never consider propositions before breakfast.”

  Sharon gasped, as if he had punched her. “You’re damned insulting, I must say.”

  “I thought you were against the romantic approach.”

  She looked at him consideringly. Then, leaning back so that her collar-bones stood out in ridges, she said, “Shall I give you breakfast here?”

  “Why not?” said Harold Loudron, entering. “Do stay, won’t you, Strangeways? We could ring up your house and tell them——”

  “It’s very kind of you, but I’d better be off.”

  Sharon gave him a hot dry hand. As he went out, he felt her gaze upon his back, tenacious as brambles across a path.

  CHAPTER V

  Unkindest Cuts

  NEXT MORNING, AFTER breakfast, Nigel walked down to the Loudrons’ house. James Loudron had telephoned him last night, asking him to come. A Sunday quiet was over the town. In the park a few people walked, exercising their dogs: bits of paper blew about the road as Nigel came to the bottom of the hill, his mind at grips with the pathologist’s report, the gist of which the D.D.I. had passed on to him the previous evening. It was a report which made the death of Dr. Piers even more mysterious and bizarre than his disappearance.

  Dr. James brought him into a room on the left of the hall—a square room, its panelled walls painted with graining and knots to resemble stripped wood, a large desk in the middle and bookshelves built into the alcoves on either side of the fireplace.

  “This was my father’s study.”

  Nigel commented on the panelling.

  “Yes. My mother had it done for him. Not long before she died. As a present for his birthday.” James Loudron’s heavy face was bleak with some unhappy reminiscence. He paused, then jerked out, “He didn’t really like it at all.”

  “No?”

  “He could be very cutting. I suppose I oughtn’t to say that, but——”

  “I can imagine,” ventured Nigel, “he was not altogether easy to live with.”

  “My mother was a saint,” James blurted out; then, as if aware that along this line he might quickly go too far, twitched his ponderous shoulders and said, “We’re in rather a spot, you know.”

  “The pathologist’s findings?”

  “You’ve heard about that? Yes. I’ve not told the others yet. The fact is—I don’t quite know how to approach this——”

  “You’d like me to help? Professionally?”

  “That’s it.” James seemed absurdly relieved. “Sort of friend at court. You told us at dinner you sometimes took on this sort of thing.”

  “Certainly. But I must make it quite clear that I don’t work against the police.”

  James looked quite shocked. “Of course. I should be the last person to ask you to compound a felony, or whatever it’s called. Not,” he added hastily, “that there can be any question of a felony here. I mean, in the sense of——” He spluttered to a stop, like a car with a choked petrol-feed. Nigel tactfully helped him out, then asked if he could talk to all the members of the family together. James went out to collect them and ring up Harold.

  Pompous, earnest, socially inept, humourless, single-minded: overshadowed by his father, but likely to blossom out now the shadow is removed, and become with greater self-confidence a more than adequate practitioner: devoted to his mother, and probably resented his father’s treatment of her: is appalled—as he and everyone else keep drumming into my head—by the possible effect of the tragedy upon his practice: but would this be sufficient to account for the terrible uneasiness which he so ineffectually tries to conceal? Uneasiness? Or bewilderment?

  Dragging himself out of these sterile meditations, Nigel began to prowl about the room. The books told him little he did not know about Dr. Piers’s refined taste: there were two shelves of art books, an array of biography, a good selection of classics and modern novelists, little poetry. The medical text-books were kept, presumably, in the surgery. The drawers of the leather-topped desk were not locked: they had been left open, no doubt, after the search for the missing diary.

  It was this diary which most exercised Nigel’s mind just now. Either Dr. Piers had started writing it, or for some unimaginable reason he had told a lie when he said he was keeping a diary. If there had been a diary, four possibilities arose: either Dr. Piers had destroyed it himself or hidden it, or someone else had destroyed it or was hiding it. It seemed unlikely that Dr. Piers could have hidden it so successfully as to elude a search by his own family. Did he destroy it, then? Surely he would only do so if it contained matter he did not wish to be made public after his death: which implied that, after his announcement at the dinner party, he somehow became aware that he was shortly going to be dead: which implied suicide. And suicide, as the pathologist’s report showed, was almost (but not quite) out of the question. Well then, had some member of the household destroyed it? A murderer, because it gave him away? Possibly, but the diary might also have been destroyed, after the doctor’s disappearance, by one of the family, either to protect a murderer or merely to get rid of something that would prove embarrassing to himself if it were exposed. The fourth alternative—that one of the household was concealing it—implied that the diary was dangerous or embarrassing to him at present, but later might become useful. Useful for blackmail? for self-defence? for the vindication of someone?

  Nigel turned his mind to something less ambiguous. The physical diary itself. What would Dr. Piers be liable to write in? He was the kind of man who might well have bought a sumptuous, tooled-leather article. But also, Nigel’s intuition told him, the old man might equally well have started jotting down—how had he put it?—“not exactly for confession, but for the drawing-up of a balance-sheet”—on the first paper that came handy. And what would come handy for a doctor? A prescription-pad—too small for the purpose. A case-book? Yes, thought Nigel excitedly, and that could account for why the diary had not been found: a doctor’s case-books are top secret: even his own family would feel inhibited from prying into them—Rebecca, certainly, if it had been she who did the searching. Presumably the subsequent search by the police would have covered the surgery; but by that time the case-book, with its diary pages, might have been taken away and concealed. It should be simple enough to find out, from an inspection of Dr. Piers’s records, whether one of his case-books was missing.

  A car drew up outside—a Jaguar—from which Harold Loudron emerged. Letting himself in at the front door, he called out for James, who ran downstairs and took Nigel and Harold up to the drawing-room. In the morning sunshine its white-panelled walls, the brilliant pictures and the exquisite blending of colours in carpet and hangings and upholstery, together with the figures of Rebecca, Graham and Walter Barn, who were sitting there like people in a painter’s conversation-piece—all made it resemble a distinguished salon. Even Walt Barn had, somewhat surprisingly, got himself into a Sunday suit. And it was not only the sunlit room itself, so gracious and airy, which gave Nigel the impression of a lightening—an atmosphere easier to breathe, as it were, than it had been that night after dinner when the presence of the patriarchal Dr. Loudron had overcast the assembly.

  James, leaning his elbow on the mantelshelf and clumsily stuffing a pipe, told them he had asked for Nigel’s help, then with a brusque gesture handed over to him. After offering his condolences, Nigel turned to Rebecca.

  “Your brother and I have heard the gist of the pathologist’s report. It won’t be very pleasant to listen to. If you’d rather——”

  “No. Please tell us everything,” she said, with a lift of her chin and a steady look at Nigel. There was a new, unconscious dignity in her bearing, though her eyes were heavy with grief or sleeplessness. “I am a doctor’s daughter,” she added.

  “Well then. The medical evidence is consistent with your father’s having died on the night he disappeared. But it does not rule out his dying up to two days later. The cause of death is not absolutely established.”

  “But sure
ly—wasn’t he drowned?” Graham Loudron’s expressionless eyes were fixed attentively upon Nigel’s.

  “No. His body was found in the river, as you know. It had been badly mutilated by the screw of a steamer. But, fortunately for this investigation, it was his legs and not his arms which were cut off.”

  Nigel paused, where he stood by one of the tall windows, closely scrutinising the five of them. They all looked—or managed to look—blankly puzzled.

  “The inspector—he came twice yesterday—didn’t tell us that,” said Rebecca.

  “He told me—in confidence,” said James.

  “Why,” asked Graham, “is this fortunate for the investigation?”

  “Because the arteries of both wrists were severed,” Nigel flatly replied.

  “Then he did commit suicide,” said Harold, almost to himself.

  Walter Barn cocked up his round head. “But that’s fantastic. D’you mean the old man walked down to the river, through that fog, in nothing but an overcoat, then cut his wrists and threw himself in—all in one motion, like?”

  James coughed—in embarrassment or warningly.