The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  “In my job,” said Wright genially, “we have to ask millions of questions, only a few of which turn out to be the crucial ones. Between your visits to Mrs. Hyams, what did you do, sir?”

  He had gone up to his room, said James Loudron, wishing to read up a medical point; but Rebecca’s gramophone in the adjoining room had disturbed his concentration, so he brought the book down to the study.

  “And during this period—10.15 to about eleven—you heard nothing that now strikes you as suspicious or out of the ordinary?”

  “No. But mind you, I was concentrating pretty hard. I wouldn’t have noticed anything short of a telephone bell ringing.”

  “I appreciate that. And now tell me, Doctor,” Wright went on with no change of tone or emphasis, “what did your mother die of?”

  “My mother die of?” James’s expression of perplexity was quite ludicrous. “What on earth do you think you’re getting at?”

  “I know it must seem an irrelevance. But could you please tell me?”

  After a long stare at the inspector, Dr. James launched out on a medical statement, ending “what is generally known as fatty degeneration of the heart.”

  “It would be incorrect to say that she died of neglect?”

  “Neglect?” James exploded. “She had the best medical attention in—where the devil did you get such a preposterous idea?”

  “Your brother Graham has hinted that she died of neglect.”

  “Graham? The bloody little twister! Neglect, indeed! It’s absolutely insufferable.” For a moment, in the midst of the storm, an extraordinary change came over James’s angry face—a sort of breathless, anguished calm out of which, almost inaudibly, he muttered. “But how could he know?” Then he glared suspiciously at Wright, like a bull which has discovered that a nice, warm extent of sand is in fact an arena dotted with infuriating colours and inimical objects, and put down his heavy head and charged. Graham was untrustworthy, sly, disloyal. He could not stick at anything: after being asked to leave the public school to which Dr. Piers had sent him, he had been found several jobs but given each of them up—or been sacked—after a short trial. The trouble was, Graham had been over-indulged and totally spoilt by Dr. Piers.

  James’s jealousy of his brother’s preferential treatment came out clearly enough; but Nigel felt there was something fictitious about his diatribe, as though he had whipped himself up into this rage against Graham in order to conceal from them, or from himself, a deeper-rooted grievance.

  When James Loudron had been finger-printed and released, Wright turned to Nigel.

  “Talk about happy families!” he said, rolling up his eyes. “Well, free period now for Strangeways. I’ve fixed to see Mr. and Mrs. Harold Loudron at 6.30, when he’s back from the City. Pick you up at 6.25.”

  “And what will you be doing till then?”

  “Amongst other things, I must have a talk with that district nurse, and with Mrs. Hyams.”

  That evening, as the police car moved down Crooms Hill and into the Woolwich Road, Inspector Wright told Nigel the result of these conversations. Mrs. Hyams had suffered no post-natal complications: she and her husband had not expected Dr. James to return so soon after the birth—he had certainly not told them he would do so—but they were not surprised when he did, for he was one who “took ever so much trouble.” The district nurse was a little surprised. Though the birth had been far from easy, she had not thought Dr. James unduly anxious about the mother. On the other hand he was a bit of a fuss-pot, the nurse tactfully hinted without using the expression.

  “Your comments?” asked Wright.

  “If Dr. James killed his father, and it was part of a premeditated plan that he should take the Daimler and dump the body in the river, using a visit to Mrs. Hyams as pretext, I should have thought he’d have told her and the nurse that he’d be returning shortly on a second visit, just to safeguard himself. If the murder was unplanned, the result of a sudden boiling-up of passion, then the murder-method is wildly paradoxical. You don’t neatly sever people’s arteries in that state of mind—you bash them or strangle them.”

  The police car turned left off the Woolwich Road, and hummed down towards the river. Harold Loudron took them into the room overlooking the Thames, where Sharon was already sitting. Nigel introduced Inspector Wright and the sergeant. After the usual preliminary politeness about being sorry to inconvenience them—just the routine of investigation—Wright said he wished to interview Mr. and Mrs. Loudron separately. Harold, frowning, started to protest about this, but Sharon said:

  “Don’t be silly, Harold. The inspector won’t bite you.” Her green eyes delayed upon Wright, who returned her his most antiseptic smile. “Nigel can come and talk to me, while you’re being grilled.”

  “Sorry,” said Nigel, “but I’m sitting in with Inspector Wright. Duty before pleasure.”

  The red-haired girl pouted at him, then teetered out with her model’s walk. This time, Wright aimed straight for the gold.

  “I understand, Mr. Loudron, you had a telephone conversation with your father the night he died?”

  “Yes. But it’s quite——”

  “Will you please tell me the substance of that conversation?”

  “I entirely fail to see how this concerns your present business,” Harold smoothly replied.

  “I am trying to establish your father’s state of mind. If he committed suicide——”

  “But I thought there was no question about that.”

  “That he committed suicide?”

  “I—er—no—the reverse.”

  “It has yet to be proved. Now, if your father had had bad news, something involving one of his family—he was very much the family man, I gather—if some disgrace threatened a member of his family, would you say he was the sort of man who might take his own life?”

  “But this is quite fantastic. Purely—er—problematical.”

  “Your own business affairs, for example——”

  “They are my own affair. And I assure you they will bear the closest investigation.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, sir. Because they may have to be investigated.”

  Harold started up from the kidney-shaped chair he was sitting on and flipped his cigarette into the fire-place. “This is the most unwarrantable interference with the liberties of the private citizen!”

  “Oh, come, come now. In an investigation of this nature, the police are bound to inquire into background and motive. Do I take it that you refuse to tell us the substance of that telephone conversation?”

  “Look here, Strangeways, is this man within his rights to put questions of this sort?”

  “He is.”

  “Very well then. I’ve nothing to conceal. But, frankly, I was in a slight, temporary financial embarrassment; and I did ask my father for a loan.”

  “How Slight?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How much did you ask for?”

  Wright’s abrupt question, so alien to the gilded circumlocutions of the City, clearly put Harold off his stroke. However, after a pause, he said:

  “Frankly, I needed a fair sum. For consolidation and—er—development, you know. I had in mind a figure of £10,000.”

  Wright’s eyebrows went up. “And did your father agree to back you to that extent?”

  “I’ve no doubt he would have.”

  “But he made no promises? On the telephone, he was heard to say the matter could not be as urgent as you represented it to be, and must wait till to-morrow.”

  As Wright pursued this line, Nigel scrutinised Harold Loudron. The smooth face, the dapper figure, the uniform dark suit—one saw hundreds of this type streaming across London Bridge in the rush hour, with their bowlers and rolled umbrellas and brief-cases and copies of The Financial Times—an anonymous army, an army of ants swarming towards their mysterious occupations. That was the word for Harold—“anonymous.” What personality was concealed behind the uniform clothes, the dreary, evasive jargon
? No one who keeps prefacing his remarks with “frankly” can be trusted an inch, thought Nigel: the Martini-and smoked-salmon brigade: the I’m-not-in-business-for-my-health battalion: the sailing-near-the-wind flotilla.

  A steam-whistle roared. From his window-seat, Nigel saw a cargo-liner approaching, port, starboard and masthead lights jewelling the dusk.

  “I believe you have a motor-launch?” Wright was saying.

  “Yes. She’s laid up for the winter, though.”

  Wright asked for the name of the yard. He strolled over to the window, now almost filled by the approaching ship. “Lovely view you have.” Wright gazed down a moment at the river lapping the wall from which Harold’s house-front rose.

  “You were at home here the night your father died?”

  “That is so.”

  “Both you and your wife? No visitors?”

  “Quite. We had dinner, then we played Scrabble a while and later watched a television play, till bedtime.”

  “What would you say if I told you we have information that Mrs. Loudron was not here all the evening?”

  Harold Loudron seemed to be groping so hard for the right facial expression with which to receive this, that he could spare no energy for a reply.

  “. . . that she visited your father’s house?” Wright persisted.

  A covert look of relief was instantly replaced by one of indignation.

  “We have already told the police we were at home all the evening. It appears that someone is trying to make trouble for my wife and I.”

  Nigel shuddered inwardly at the appalling solecism.

  “Who told you this?” Harold continued.

  “Information received, sir.”

  Nigel observed that Wright, always one for a bit of gamesmanship, had been countering Harold’s business-English with heavy strokes of official police jargon during this interview.

  “Why on earth should my wife go out in a fog like that? It’s ridiculous.”

  “I couldn’t say. We must ask her.”

  Wright cut short Harold’s protests, got his reluctant consent to be finger-printed, and then asked the sergeant to fetch Mrs. Loudron.

  “It’s all right, I’ll get her,” said Harold hurriedly.

  “Thank you, sir. The sergeant will go with you, then. . . . And that’s put a spoke in his wheel,” Wright added when they had gone out. “Pompous young smoothie.”

  “You don’t look at all like my idea of a policeman,’” said Sharon as she disposed herself on the sofa.

  “Oh, we come in all shapes and sizes at the Yard, ma’am.”

  “What have you been doing to poor Harold? He looked perfectly devastated.”

  “Giving him the third degree,” replied Wright amiably.

  “And now it’s my turn. Goody,” Sharon languished at the inspector.

  “Just so, Mrs. Loudron. Now tell me first about the night your father-in-law died. How long did you stay in his house that night?”

  Sharon’s long red nails screeched on the marble-topped table beside her, as she convulsively drew back the hand that was reaching out languorously in Wright’s direction.

  “Damn! Now I’ve broken a nail. What were you saying?”

  Wright repeated the question.

  “Oh, that’s absurd. I never went out that night. The fog was hellish. Harold and I had a homey evening. We had dinner, just the two of us, and then we played Scrabble and watched a television play.”

  “Yet we have two witnesses who heard your voice in Graham Loudron’s room at about 9.45 p.m.”

  “Two witnesses! This is insane. What in hell’s name should I be doing in Graham’s room?”

  “Perhaps you went to fetch that record he’d promised you.” Nigel’s mild comment got a quite staggering reaction. Sharon’s face went suddenly haggard, the colour of dead ash, fury and fear chasing one another across it. Her hands trembled as she lit a cigarette and plugged it into a long holder. At last she got herself under control.

  “Will someone tell me what all this is about?” she asked in a husk of her usual hoarse drawl.

  ‘Yes. That night we all had dinner together, Graham Loudron told you he’d be getting that record for you ‘in a few days,’ and you said you could hardly wait for it. What was the record, by the way?”

  “How can I remember? Some record or other.” Her eyes rolled sluggishly in her head.

  “Had he got it for you when you went there?”

  “No. Yes, I mean.”

  “Could we see it?” asked Wright, who had not the faintest clue to all this, but admirably concealed it.

  “I haven’t got it. I left it there.”

  “So you were there the night Dr. Piers was murdered?”

  “I—no, it was another night. I remember now.”

  “But you did go to Graham Loudron’s room on the night in question? the night Dr. Piers——”

  “For Christ’s sake will you two stop pestering me, confusing me!” The woman almost shrieked it, her hands over her ears.

  “Which room do you keep your gramophone in?” asked Nigel. “I don’t see one here.”

  “We haven’t got a bloody gramophone.”

  “What were you going to play the record on, then?”

  Silence.

  “Perhaps ‘record’ was a code-word between you and Graham for something else?” suggested Nigel.

  Wright gave him a warning glance. “I don’t think we’ll pursue this any further at the moment. Mrs. Loudron does not seem very well. I’ll come back to-morrow, Mrs. Loudron, for another chat; and we can take your fingerprints then.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  A House in the Isle of Dogs

  NIGEL WALKED THROUGH the white-tiled, echoing tube, lit by a long succession of electric globes in its roof—a roof upon which, so he felt, millions of tons of water must be relentlessly pressing. The Greenwich tunnel was almost empty at this time of the morning: a few boys sky-larking at the far end, their hoarse shouts bouncing along the tube towards him; a few housewives ambling behind him with their shopping bags: these might have been extras in an early German expressionist film, heavy with symbolism, in which the hero was shown walking through an endless, monotonous tube, casting grotesque shadows upon its curved, white-glaring walls—walking alone, isolated in some obsessional neurosis, through a tunnel which had no outlet, on a mission whose end he had no knowledge of.

  Nigel shook himself out of these morbid imaginings. His mission had a quite definite purpose. “You like burrowing into the past,” Wright had said yesterday evening after the interview with Harold Loudron and Sharon: “well, you go and have a talk with Graham’s old tart to-morrow. I shall be busy elsewhere.” Wright had not been too pleased with Nigel’s jumping the gun at that last interview. He did not wish Sharon to know what the police suspected about her relationship with Graham Loudron, and Nigel’s suggestion that “records” might be a code-word between them could have put her on her guard. “But my dear chap,” Nigel had protested, “I said that to force them into the open. If she tries to communicate with him now, you’ll know there’s something in it. You’ll have them both under observation, I take it, and you’ve got a man on the telephone extension at Number 6.”

  The lift took him and the housewives up to the surface. Strolling into the Island Gardens, he looked across the water. The two wings of the Palace faced him, battleship-grey in the sunshine, surmounted by their twin towers, the White Ensign flying. Between and beyond them stood the Queen’s House in its plain, incomparable elegance; and on the hill high above, the statue of General Wolfe, with Wren’s observatory beside it, held the skyline. In the Palace over there the body of Nelson had lain, on its journey between Trafalgar and the tomb, while his rough seamen swilled grog and damned their eyes and wept like babies.

  A smart black ship, with the label of the General Steam Navigation Company on its funnel, swept past towards the Pool of London, followed by a singularly unvoluptuous-looking vessel, called Cyprian Coast. A Finnish tramp,
its tall funnel heavily smoking, its hull rusty and patched, was moving in ballast down-river, the half-submerged screw sullenly thumping the water. A collier was unloading at the Greenwich power-station, the clatter of whose conveyers could be distantly heard: high up on the Heath-Robinson-esque structure a travelling crane shifted, then let down its grab to gouge out coal from the bowels of the ship. To its right, the oily water smoothed over the place where the body of Dr. Piers Loudron had been salvaged from the river. A quick-fire burst of riveting rattled across from a shipyard near the Trafalgar Tavern where lighters were being repaired. Away to the left, a piercing, blue-white eye opened—the dazzling flame of a welder’s burner.

  Nigel walked out of the gardens, turned left, and presently right, down Barque Street into West Ferry Road. Here he turned right again, passing the ends of Schooner Street and Brig Street, and came to Yawl Street. These romantically-named streets, running south from West Ferry Road towards the waterfront, had been knocked to bits in the early blitzes of the war. The dingy houses still standing were interspersed with scrofulous patches of grass, tumbled brick, bald foundations. Apart from its name on a wall, Yawl Street hardly existed: but at its far end Nigel saw a house standing, like a single, decaying stump in an otherwise toothless jaw. This must be Nelly’s house, unless Graham had given them a false address.

  The bell jangled. A yellow face appeared momentarily at a ground-floor window, then the dirty muslin curtain was pulled back again. Presently a girl of sluttish appearance opened the door; her body slouched against the doorpost, her ankles turning over above the pin-heeled shoes, she regarded Nigel with a sort of lifeless insolence.

  “Nelly in?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “Search me. What d’you want with her?”

  “A friend of mine, Graham Loudron, gave me her address.”

  “Never heard of him. She expecting you?”

  “I couldn’t say. Are you on the telephone?”

  “Telephone! Listen to him! This ain’t the Ritz, mister.”

  So, unless Graham had written to Nelly, or walked over since the interview yesterday morning, he could not have warned her.