The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  “But I don’t see how this clears Graham,” Clare put in.

  “He heard the doctor going out in his car. That was a little after 11.10. Therefore he could not have smashed the lamps at 11.15.”

  “But he could have heard this morning that his brother had gone out,” Clare protested.

  “No. Dr. James told me he’d not mentioned the call to anyone at home before we started interviewing them.”

  “It clears Graham all right,” said Nigel slowly, “unless it was he who made the call.”

  “Exactly. Let’s forget the remote possibility that it was a hoax by an outsider. Either Dr. James pretended he had received the call—no one in the house heard the telephone go, but it’s in the study and they wouldn’t hear it upstairs—as a pretext for taking his car out and driving to East Greenwich; or it was X, ringing from a public call-box.”

  “X being Graham or Walter?”

  “Or Harold Loudron—we’ll come to him in a moment. X would make a bogus call to implicate James. If in fact there was no call, James is lying and he must be the murderer.”

  “It’d be a pretty stupid alibi to fake—saying he’d had a call which took him so near the scene of his crime,” said Nigel.

  “Yes. But there’s the matter of his gauntlet gloves. Since these depositions were taken, we found them stuffed away in a locked cupboard in the surgery. They have scratches on their backs—the sort of marks that could have been made by a woman’s nails clawing at the wearer’s hands. Fresh scratches.”

  “What does James say about this?”

  “He says they were not on the hall table, where he usually keeps them, when he went out last night. Professed himself baffled as to how they could have got into the surgery cupboard. Wasn’t sure when he’d used or noticed them last—a couple of days ago, he thought.”

  “So either he’s lying again, or it was another move in a plan to frame him for the murder.”

  “If he killed Sharon, surely he’d have thrown the gloves into the river?” said Clare. “It’d be asking for trouble to hide them in his own surgery.”

  “Yes. But murderers do the most god-damn silly things.”

  “So that leaves us with Harold.”

  Harold Loudron’s evidence was somewhat incoherent. Wright had found him prostrate with shock and grief (or was it remorse?) for the death of his wife, and had not pressed him hard. Harold had met his business associate at the Savoy for dinner, leaving the restaurant at 10.45 p.m. So much the friend had confirmed.

  “But I thought he’d previously told Sergeant Reed he didn’t get home till midnight?” said Nigel sharply. “It’d only take twenty to thirty minutes to cover the distance at night.”

  “Just so. I taxed him with this. He said he’d drunk too much at dinner, and realising soon after he started home that he wasn’t in a fit condition to drive, he parked the car in a side street and waited till he’d sobered up a bit.”

  “What street?”

  “He doesn’t know. Thinks it was a turning off Tooley Street. It’s an ingeniously simple fabrication, if it isn’t true.”

  “He could easily have pinched his brother’s gauntlet gloves. But how the devil would he contrive to get his wife out of the house, at that time of night?” said Nigel after a short silence. “I can’t see her agreeing to take a romantic stroll with him through the scrap-yard. But you’re looking very sphinx-like—was it one of her own stockings that Sharon was strangled with?”

  “No. It was one of Rebecca’s,” Wright replied.

  “Rebecca’s?” Clare gaped at him.

  “To be precise, one of her mother’s. She’s got drawers stuffed with her mother’s things. I thought this was rather an old-fashioned stocking: heavy silk, not nylon. We found the other one of the pair in a drawer, together with several rolled-up pairs.”

  “And how did Rebecca react to this discovery of yours?”

  “Well, she panicked a bit. First said she didn’t know a stocking was missing: then changed her tune and said oh yes, she remembered now, she’d torn it accidentally some years ago, while wearing it, and had thrown it away.”

  “Not what one would expect her to do with a sacred relic,” said Nigel.

  “No. But I’m not convinced she was lying when she said she didn’t know one of the pair was missing.”

  “But she knew, before you interviewed her, that Sharon had been strangled with a silk stocking?”

  “Yes. Dr. James blurted that out in the family circle as soon as I telephoned him, though I’d particularly requested him not to.”

  “Your X, whoever he is, seems to be flinging suspicion around rather indiscriminately,” said Clare. “Isn’t it odd that he should try to incriminate James and Rebecca?”

  “Yes. Which inclines me to think he is one or the other of them.”

  “How did those two react during the interviews?” asked Nigel.

  “Pity you weren’t there,” said Wright crisply. “Miss Loudron, as I told you, seemed panicky. Her brother looked as if he’d been hit with a mallet. I’d say they were both less upset by Sharon’s death than by its effect on Harold. It’s only my guess, but I had a feeling they were concealing another kind of anxiety about him.”

  “That Harold might have killed Sharon?”

  “Yes. And I suppose he had a strongish motive. He’s an uxorious type; and she’d been unfaithful to him with Graham. If James or Rebecca is not the murderer, no doubt it was their fears for Harold that made them sell me the Dutch seaman so vigorously.”

  Clare started up in her chair. “But how did they know about the seaman?”

  “Graham told them—no, you mustn’t draw the wrong inference. He accompanied James when his brother went to fetch Harold this morning—that was early, just after I’d telephoned James to break the news to him. It seems that, while James was giving Harold a sedative and so on, Graham thought he’d do a little private detection. He got into conversation with a group of women on Ballast Quay—they were all standing at their doors by then, drinking in the delicious sensation of having a murdered woman’s body so near their homes. They told him about Jan’s escapade.”

  “But he didn’t pass the information on to you, I notice,” said Nigel, tapping the sheaf of transcripts.

  “No. Claimed he’d been too busy over Harold, etc. He’s an unco-operative type, though.”

  Nigel gazed ruminatively down his nose. “You’ve said it. Yet he suddenly becomes madly co-operative, volunteers to accompany James to Harold’s house. That’s not at all in character, is it?”

  “Morbid curiosity, maybe—going to the scene of the crime.”

  “Or returning to it,” said Nigel.

  There was a silence. Then Nigel said, “Sharon told me she was afraid what ‘they’ might do if they discovered she’d talked about Graham s drug-racket. We’ve got to bear that in mind as a possible reason for the crime. Who are ‘they’ anyway, apart from Abdul, who’s presumably on the high seas?”

  “The Narcotics chums haven’t been able to unearth any widespread racket here. They’re inclined to think now that it’s only been a matter of a small parcel conveyed to Graham Loudron and distributed by him to a few favoured acquaintances.”

  “Perhaps that’s why Graham didn’t try very hard to conceal from me that he’d done a bit of drug-passing. Still, if he did have other associates——”

  “They’d not go to those lengths,” said Wright dogmatically. “Carve her up a bit, maybe. But not kill her. Take it from me—I know that sort of criminal.”

  “I believe you. But it’s a tempting idea—one of Graham’s associates killing the poor girl while Graham himself sits tight at home diverting suspicion on to Rebecca and James.”

  Clare’s beautiful eyes looked troubled. “It’s confusing to have two morally irresponsible people concerned in the case.”

  “The other being Walter Barn?” said Wright.

  “Yes. I feel that both he and Graham are capable of telling elaborate lies, of doing thin
gs like hiding James’s gauntlets—of making away with Dr. Piers’s diary, even—out of sheer impish cussedness. They’ve not started to grow up, morally. They’d enjoy confusing the issues; Graham particularly would relish leading Nigel up the garden path—he had it in for Nigel from the start.”

  “You may be right,” commented the inspector, but without much conviction.

  “Aren’t you too readily inclined, in criminal cases, to assume there are only two motives for witnesses lying—either to conceal their own connection with the crime or to protect someone else? What about the person who can’t resist a piece of mischief—the grown-up child who throws a spanner in the works just to see what will happen?”

  CHAPTER XIII

  The High Old Roman Way

  CLARE’S THEORISING WAS to be tested sooner than any of them would have predicted. Wright had only been gone half an hour, and Nigel and Clare were reading books, their chairs drawn close to the cosy-stove, when the doorbell rang. Graham Loudron was standing outside.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” said Clare, in markedly neutral tones, when Nigel brought him in.

  “I do hope I’m not disturbing you, Miss Massinger? I imagined you wouldn’t be working as late as this.”

  Graham’s suave address and jeune-premier appearance made it sound, to Nigel, like the opening lines of a third-rate West-End comedy; I am the elderly husband, solid but dull, whom the dashing and specious young man intends to supplant in his wife’s affections. By the end of Act I he seems likely to succeed. The wife is flattered: her maternal feeling for the young man is being diverted into a more questionable channel. But in Act II, our deb. daughter appears. Etc., etc.

  “I really came to see your—to have a talk with Strangeways,” Graham was saying.

  “Talk away,” said Clare crisply.

  Oh dear, thought Nigel, the dialogue’s going wrong already.

  “Get him a drink, darling,” Clare added.

  Aha, she’s pretending indifference—dislike, even—to throw dust in the husband’s eyes: we must be in Scene 2 of Act I. “What would you like? Whisky? Armagnac?” Or is it a thriller, not a comedy? A hand comes out from a secret panel while the husband’s back is turned, shakes a powder into the young man’s glass. He dies, down-stage right. The husband is suspected. But the poisoner turns out to be their faithful old housekeeper, whose daughter has been seduced by the young man.

  “This is ghastly about Sharon,” said the young man, cradling his glass of Armagnac in both palms.

  “You were fond of her?” asked Clare.

  Graham’s eyes were fastened upon hers. With an air of rueful candour, he said:

  “I don’t know about fond. We’d been lovers. Once. But you know about that, don’t you . . .? She had such vitality. I can’t believe—somehow I feel responsible for it.”

  “For her death? Why?” Nigel tried to make his tone sympathetic. If Graham was going to un-clam, he must not be discouraged.

  The small, prehensile mouth moved, as if to get a grip on some tenable form of words. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. If I hadn’t started it——”

  “You mean a general feeling of guilt?” Clare put in.

  Graham mumbled something incoherent.

  “Or are you worried that Harold punished her for her infidelity?” Clare went on, regardless of a warning glance from Nigel, who thought she was making the pace too hot.

  “Oh, not Harold, surely,” said Graham, a shade over-strenuously. “After all, it wasn’t the first time she’d——But anyway, isn’t that Dutch seaman the likeliest person?”

  “Sharon was neither robbed nor raped. We don’t even know that she was killed at the time when he came along: it may have been later. Or again, he may have seen the murder.”

  “Seen it?” Graham looked horrified.

  Nigel told him about the couple, apparently lovers, whom Jan had passed in the alleyway. “Jan may be useful to the police. He might be able to identify the person he saw.”

  “Oh.” Graham seemed temporarily silenced by this thought. “But it was very dark, wasn’t it?” he resumed. “And the chap was blind drunk. He walked straight into the river. Or so some people living there told me.”

  “That’s true. But a man can sometimes recall something, in a vivid flash, out of his drunk period. Something he didn’t consciously take in at the time.”

  “That’s assuming the couple he saw were Sharon and——”

  “Yes. We have no evidence for it. Yet. Would you like some more Armagnac?”

  “Thank you.” Graham held out his glass with a steady hand. “I need this. To give me courage for a confession.”

  Nigel and Clare withheld comment.

  “Tell me—” Graham gave them his rare smile, which had considerable charm—“tell me first, are you pretty sure that Sharon’s death is linked up with my father’s?”

  “Absolutely certain.”

  “Very well. Then you’d better read this.”

  Graham stood up, and leaning against the mantelshelf, took a folded piece of paper from his wallet, and handed it to Nigel. Nigel opened it. There were seven lines of manuscript writing, the beginning of the top line charred away: the script was either Dr. Piers’s or an excellent forgery.

  . . . stall him. If I died before he could kill me—why didn’t that occur to me?—it would solve the whole problem. Justice would be done without making him a murderer. The high old Roman way out of trouble. Fall on one’s sword—only I haven’t got a sword, and if I had I’m so light I should probably bounce off the point. Petronius, then. The hedonist’s method. Euthanasia. Yes, that’s the answer.

  “Where did you find this?” asked Nigel, passing the charred paper to Clare.

  “In the surgery. There were several pages of an old case-book—my father had started writing his diary in it.”

  “When did you find it?”

  “The morning he disappeared.”

  “You found the book, or just this fragment?”

  “Oh, the book.”

  “You were looking for it, then?”

  “Of course I was looking for it,” Graham answered, a little feverishly. “He’d talked about a diary the night you came to dinner. And when he disappeared, I thought the diary might tell us why. So I worked out in my mind where the diary could be. I got it in one. Pinched the key of the cupboard, and found the case-book.”

  “You read through them all till you came to this one?”

  “Oh no,” replied Graham, with a veiled look, “I had a pretty good idea which year to turn up.”

  “Then you tore out the pages and burnt them, all but this piece?”

  “Not immediately. I kept them hidden for a while. Then my father’s body was found, and I knew the police would be turning on the heat. So I burnt the rest.”

  “Why only the rest?”

  Graham looked rueful again. “I meant first to burn them all. I put a match to the last sheet. But I suddenly realised how important these lines at the bottom were: so I beat out the flames just as it reached them.”

  There was a long stretch of silence. Graham sat down and took a gulp at his Armagnac. He was trembling a little now, as if from a release of tension.

  “I see,” said Nigel at last, unable to postpone any longer the crucial question. If Graham answered it wrongly, the answer would all but convict him of murder. “And who do you suppose is the ‘he’ your father is writing about? Dr. James?”

  “James? Good lord, no. It’s me.”

  Graham had not answered wrongly.

  “. . . ‘stall him’—I suppose that word was ‘forestall.’ You seriously mean to tell us that what your father is saying here is that he’s going to commit suicide in order to prevent you killing him first? It takes a bit of swallowing.”

  “I know. I wouldn’t believe it myself, if it wasn’t written down there in black and white.”

  “So you had intended to kill him, and he knew it?”

  “I’d better tell you the who
le story.”

  It was not until he had met Nelly, two months ago, said Graham, that he had connected Dr. Piers with his mother. When Nellie told him about the letters which Millie had sent, in extremis, to the father of her child, Graham had suddenly wondered if these might not be the letters which he had overheard James and Rebecca discussing—the cause of the dreadful estrangement between their parents. He had, of course, wondered about his own parentage often enough before this; but now everything fitted into place—Dr. Piers’s seeking him out seven years ago, taking him into his home, adopting him, and treating his subsequent misdemeanours with such leniency, all this would carry sense as the old doctor’s attempt to make restitution for what he had done to Millie.

  This, Graham explained, was why he had gone straight to the case-book for 1940—the year in which, if he himself was indeed the fruit of their love, the love-affair between Millie and Dr. Piers had taken place. His father had a vein of sentiment beneath his sophisticated surface, and would be likely to choose the book of that year for his confession.

  After Nellie first gave him the clue, Graham had made inquiries among those who had been hers and Millie’s neighbours in East Greenwich during the 1939–40 period. He had finally found a woman who, plied with drink in a local pub, refreshed her memory to the extent of recalling that Millie had been a patient of Dr. Piers and that she (the narrator) had suspected there was something between them when, one day, she saw Dr. Piers calling the girl into his consulting room. The pair must have been remarkably discreet, for the woman admitted she had heard no gossip about them at the time or later.

  With this knowledge, said Graham, he confronted his father. It had happened a day or two before Nigel and Clare went to dinner there. Dr. Piers had not attempted to deny Graham’s charges, nor did Graham now attempt to deny that he had threatened his father’s life. The rest of the diary pages—the material he had destroyed—gave an account of this interview and of Dr. Piers’s love-affair with Millie.