The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  Nigel questioned the young man closely about the interview, getting the impression that he was holding nothing back and not minimising the hostile attitude he had taken up.

  “I must ask you this,” he said. “Did you really intend to kill your father, or were they empty threats—just to frighten and punish him.”

  Graham considered it seriously. “No, I meant to. I’d hated my father for years, long before I knew who he was.”

  “But when you found out it was Dr. Piers, who’d been good to you, who’d done everything he could to make up to you for what you’d gone through——?”

  “It’s not what I’d gone through,” Graham interrupted with a chill, restrained violence. “Not that I could forget that, mind you. But I couldn’t forgive him for letting my mother down.”

  “Yet you knew it wasn’t his fault. He never saw those letters your mother sent him, till it was too late: his wife had intercepted them.”

  “Now you’re preaching at me again,” said Graham, his old Adam returning. “I can’t stick sermonising. I had enough of that from the swine I was sent to when Mother died: preaching and beating—I got the whole works, day-after day, and on an empty stomach.” His voice had gone shrill, a self-pitying whine in it. “You people who’ve had it soft all your lives can’t begin to understand——”

  “Now you’re preaching,” said Clare gently.

  Graham gave her his deferential smile—a smile she felt he must have cultivated during the years of inhuman treatment, so artificially ingratiating did it look, a mere baring of the teeth.

  “You were going to speak about your mother,” Nigel prompted.

  “You think I should have forgotten about her after all this time? No use crying over spilt milk?”

  “I think nothing of the sort.”

  A strange expression came over the fruit-bat face. “I was only a kid when she died. But I’ll never forget her misery during those last weeks, and how she tried to hide it from me. I’d seen her turning away to cough into a handkerchief. She spat blood. She was so weak, she could hardly get out of bed in the morning or stand up at the stove. It got so she couldn’t have men any longer. And that meant we’d no money except the little she’d saved for a rainy day. Rainy day—it was a bloody deluge! She used to give me nearly all the food she bough—said she didn’t feel hungry. I don’t know how she could cough up so much blood and stay alive. I loved her, you see. I’ve never been able to love anyone since. How the hell could anyone expect me not to hate my father, who’d let all this happen?” The words came oozing out of him, like matter from a septic wound. “We had a musical box. About all we did have left. We used to play it to each other when she’d put me to bed—before she went out on to the streets and brought a man back home. She loved that musical box: maybe he had given it to her. But she had to pop it in the end. She cried a lot. I hated her crying.”

  Graham Loudron stopped abruptly, staring into the past, his eyes dry, his face hard as concrete, its rough, pitted skin testifying to those boyhood privations.

  “I see you had very strong reasons for hating your father,” said Nigel after a pause. “You threatened to kill him. Why didn’t you?”

  Graham looked up, startled. “He did it for me. I don’t think I’d have gone through with it, anyway.”

  “Why did you destroy the rest of the diary, then?”

  “That’s obvious, isn’t it? When his body was found and everyone said he’d been murdered, I had to destroy the pages that gave away the motive I had for killing him, and the fact that I’d threatened to.”

  “But you kept this bit, as a sort of insurance policy? You knew what Petronius did?”

  “I looked it up. Severed his arteries in a hot bath. You said it’d be impossible—the cuts could not have been equally deep. Well, if Petronius could do it, my father could.”

  “Petronius had a slave to do it for him, I think. Anyway, you believed this extract from his diary was proof of suicide. Why did you conceal it from us all till now?”

  A sort of old lag’s smirk appeared on Graham’s face, and at once vanished. Don’t know nothing about that,” he might have been on the point of saying. He said, “I wasn’t brought up to go rushing off and assisting the authorities. Far otherwise. I just wanted to keep out of trouble—the police would ask what I’d been up to, pinching the diary. And so on.”

  “And you liked the idea of stringing them along?” said Clare.

  “Something of that, I’ll admit.”

  “In that case, why produce it now?” asked Nigel in a neutral voice. “Because you thought you’re likely to be charged with the murder?”

  “I never touched Sharon. I was at home all last night.”

  “I’m talking about Dr. Piers’s death. That’s the only one the diary is relevant to. Why produce this fragment now?”

  Graham’s eyes were fastened limpet-like upon Nigel’s.

  “You told me Sharon’s death is linked up with my father’s,” he said. “That means one of us, one of the family, killed her. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Which means either that my father’s death was not suicide—someone killed him, and then killed Sharon because she knew too much, or else this person wanted her dead for some other reason and used my father’s death as a cover.”

  “Cover for what?”

  “For his motive for killing Sharon. Let’s say he believes my father was murdered, though in fact it was suicide. So he arranges to kill Sharon in such a way that suspicion falls upon the imagined murderer of my father.”

  “That’s a bit far-fetched.”

  “And this being so,” Graham continued, disregarding Nigel, “we have a killer in the family circle who may decide he’d like to get rid of a few more of us: perhaps so that all my father’s money may come to him, not just his own share.”

  “Why should he start off with Sharon, then? She only inherited indirectly, through Harold,” said Clare.

  “That could be a blind,” Graham replied, with a significant look at her.

  “Meaning that Harold himself killed her, just to throw dust in our eyes——”

  “He had another motive too.”

  “——and is now going to pick off the rest of you one by one. Do you seriously believe that?”

  Nigel broke in. “You seem still convinced that your father killed himself. How on earth do you explain the disappearance of his body?”

  “Obviously, someone moved it.”

  “But why?”

  “Search me. Wait a minute, though.” Graham’s long nose twitched inquisitively. “Suppose someone discovered the diary before I did—while my father was still alive. The bit about Petronius would give this person the idea for murdering him in such a way that it looked like suicide: but then he finds the diary pages gone, which were to be the final proof that it was suicide. No, that won’t do: I didn’t take them till after the body had disappeared. No. It must have been suicide. I’ve got it!” Graham excitedly snapped his fingers. “My father killed himself. One of us found the body, assumed it was murder, and threw the body into the Thames in the hope that, by the time it was recovered, the signs of murder would be obliterated. And I can tell you straight away which of us would be most likely to do that. Brother James. He’s a terror for the conventions. Never do for a murdered body to be found in a doctor’s house. Jolly bad show. How about that?”

  Nigel had felt much of this eager ingenuity to be rather preposterous and disagreeably adolescent: but he made a non-committal reply. Then, taking up the charred and crumpled piece of paper, he said, “All this theorising of yours started with ‘Suppose someone else had discovered the diary before I did.’ Well, if we’re going to suppose that, the one really important thing that follows is that this person would read about your threats to murder your father, and would have you as the perfect scapegoat if he decided to do the murder himself.”

  “Yes. That had occurred to me. But I’d have thought he’d have waited longer, to see if
I wasn’t going to get rid of my father for him. It must have thrown him pretty heavily when he found the diary pages had disappeared.”

  “Which of you seemed most exercised about hunting for the diary, after Dr. Piers’s death?”

  “I don’t know,” Graham hesitantly answered. “Becky did most of the chasing round for it. But I remember James kept asking her if she’d come across it yet; and so did Harold.” The young man got himself to his feet. “Well, it was good of you both to let me stay so long. It’s taken a weight off my mind.” He held out his hand towards Nigel “Can I have it back?” he ingenuously asked.

  “This bit from the diary? Good lord, no.”

  “But you’ve read it now.”

  “It’ll have to go to the handwriting experts. We must make certain it’s not a forgery.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  How the Body Vanished

  “I SEE YOU’RE sleeping here now,” remarked Nigel, glancing at the camp-bed covered with a tartan rug which was ranged against one wall of the study.

  “Yes,” Dr. James Loudron replied. “I have to be by the telephone at night and there isn’t one in my own room. There’s an extension in my father’s, of course: but I don’t like the idea of——”

  “Sleeping there? Naturally. You sleep well?”

  “Luckily. But the traffic on this side of the house wakes me up rather early. Why do you ask?”

  “You look as if you needed sleep.”

  And indeed the doctor did. His eyes were heavy, as if it took a painful effort to move them in their sockets: the skin beneath them looked stained and pouchy. His solid shoulders drooped dejectedly. He seemed a man at the end of his tether. A haunted man. Or a bewildered ox.

  “Well, I’ve got a half day at last. The first since——” His voice petered out again.

  “And it’s good of you to let me take up a bit of it. How did you manage?”

  “One of my colleagues at the hospital agreed to do locum for a while. He’s taken over some of my father’s patients.”

  There was another silence. Dr. James seemed too exhausted even to ask Nigel why he was here. Nigel glanced round the study, at the bed, the bookshelves, the telephone, the panelling which Janet had had painted to resemble stripped wood, in a pathetically misguided attempt to please her husband. It was in here that Walt Barn had beaten up the newspaperman, while Rebecca looked on, half appalled, half fascinated. And in here, maybe, Dr. Piers Loudron had written the diary, a fragment of which was now being examined by the handwriting experts.

  “That voice you heard on the telephone——”

  “Voice? When?” said James dully.

  “The bogus call that took you out, the night Sharon——”

  James visibly flinched. “Oh, for God’s sake! Must I go into all that again? I told the inspector I could not identify it.”

  “Not even if it was a man or a woman speaking?”

  “No. . . . But look here, how could it have been a woman?”

  “Why not?”

  “But, damn it, wasn’t it the—the person who killed Sharon? Ringing up to get me near the place where——?”

  “And couldn’t Sharon’s murderer, or an accomplice of the murderer, be a woman?”

  Dr. James lowered his head, in the old, dangerous, bull-like way.

  “Are you insinuating that Becky——?”

  “Why Becky?”

  “She’s the only woman left in our family, isn’t she? And that stocking!” The doctor shook his head as if to clear it, then burst out in the gravelly voice of exhaustion, “Who is it? Who is it that hates us so?”

  “Hates you?”

  “Using that stocking of Mother’s out of Becky’s drawer. Hiding my driving gloves. It’s absolutely fiendish. You know, if this goes on, I shall become paranoiac. My Jewish blood. We succumb to persecution-mania all too easily. No resistance.”

  Nigel eyed him in silence for several moments. The time had come. He had put this off too long, and he knew why. The lie would be no more morally respectable because it was necessary in order to clear the way to the truth.

  “And now,” he said, “I’m afraid you’re going to number me amongst the persecutors.”

  James Loudron gazed at him in a lacklustre way.

  “Will you not tell me the truth about the night when your father’s body vanished?” said Nigel, without inflection.

  “What on earth do you mean?” Dr. James sounded angry, but as if his will was lashing a tired mind into anger. “I resent that very much. I have told the truth—all I know about it—over and over again. I’m sick and tired of the whole business.”

  “When you came in that night, after delivering the baby, you went to your father’s room—perhaps to say good-night, perhaps to consult him. You found him dead. In the bath. You wrapped the body in his tweed overcoat, carried it out through the back door, put it on the front passenger’s seat of his car, drove to the river, and tipped it in beside the Trafalgar Tavern.”

  James was staring at him stupidly, as if hypnotised. “You’re mad. You must be mad. I went back in the car to my patient’s house, because——”

  “The woman had no complications,” Nigel went on tonelessly. “There was no reason whatsoever to return there so soon after the birth. And there’s no other reasonable explanation why you should have taken the car when the fog was so bad that on your first visit you had to walk there.”

  “But I have explained that. I thought the fog had lifted a bit. And who the devil are you to instruct me about my medical duties?” the doctor added with another feeble spurt of anger.

  “You were seen putting the body in the river. The police have found an eye-witness at last. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but——”

  James Loudron’s whole face and body sagged. In his rumpled suit he looked like a fifth-of-November guy. “Is that true?” he muttered, glaring sightlessly. “They’re going to arrest me, you mean? For the murder?”

  “They will certainly bring a charge. What that charge will be depends upon your telling the truth. If you could give me the facts now——”

  “I—would you mind if my sister was here?”

  “After a pause, Nigel said, “Very well.”

  “She’s in the garden, I think. I’ll fetch her.”

  When James had gone out, with a stiff, old man’s gait, Nigel had leisure to ruminate on the unpleasant ruse by which he had brought things to a head, and on James’s next movements: the garden, after all, led to the garage, and at this very moment James might be making a bolt for it.

  In a couple of minutes, however, James returned with Rebecca. Brother and sister sat side by side on the sofa, looking like chastened children, holding hands. James looked up at Nigel.

  “You do realise this means the finish of my career?”

  Nigel nodded, feeling sickened by himself. His eyes rested on James Loudron’s face: its expression had changed, putting into Nigel’s mind the lines, “If calm at all, if any calm, a calm despair.”

  “James didn’t do it!” exclaimed Rebecca, with a flash of her brown eyes.

  “I didn’t do it. But I did quite enough to, well, make the police believe I did. Sorry, that’s not very coherent.” He lifted his heavy gaze towards Nigel. “I’ve just told Becky, outside, that it was I who put my father’s body in the river.”

  “But he didn’t murder him,” said Rebecca fiercely. “James would never kill anyone in a cowardly way like that.”

  “Tell that to the police, Becky!” said her brother. “Strangeways says they’ve found an eye-witness—someone who saw me by the Trafalgar Tavern.”

  Nigel would not meet Rebecca’s eyes; but he felt they were scrutinising him keenly. “You’d better tell us exactly what happened,” he said.

  Rising, James moved to the window and turned round with his back to it, as if he could not bear the light upon his face. Past his bulky shoulder, Nigel could see the February sunshine palely gilding the stucco of the derelict cinema, once a Victori
an music-hall, on the opposite side of the road: a pigeon flew out of one of its shattered windows.

  “When I got back from the confinement, I went to father’s room. I was a bit worried about another patient, and wanted to consult him. You know,” James added with a rueful half-smile, “he had more medicine in his little finger than I and a dozen other——”

  “And he let you know it,” Rebecca put in.

  “Well, he wasn’t there. Something made me go through into the bathroom. His body was there. In the bath. Naked. The arteries had been cut. One of his razors lay in the bath beside him. The water was pink, but I could see it. I made sure he was dead. Then I examined the cuts.”

  “And you realised at once it was not suicide?”

  “Almost at once. I’m a bit rusty on the medico-legal stuff; but there were no preliminary cuts—I knew about the significance of that, of course—and then I examined closer and saw the two incised wounds were of equal depth.”

  “So you knew it was murder? And the murderer must be one of this household, or somebody who had a key to the house?” Nigel was aware of the tenseness with which Rebecca sat there, her eyes fastened on her brother. “That was why you took the terrible risk of moving the body? You were afraid of the effect it would have on the practice if Dr. Piers was found murdered in his own house?”

  “Yes.”

  “No!” Rebecca cried out forcefully. “I won’t let you make yourself out so mean, so—so mercenary. James was afraid that——”

  “Please, Becky!”

  “James was protecting me. He thought I’d done it. He’d overheard me telling Father I wished he was dead.” The woman spoke in a white heat of exaltation, and went on talking, even more rapidly and incoherently, until, James shook her by the shoulders, commanding, “Stop that, Becky! You’re getting hysterical. Stop it at once!”

  “Well anyway,” said Nigel when she had calmed down, “whatever your reason was, you moved the body. Tell me exactly what you did. It may be important.”