The Worm of Death

by Nicholas Blake

“You’ve a very low opinion of the young man.”

  “Haven’t you? He’s a criminal type, potentially, if not actually. We’ll nail him yet.”

  “For the murders? He’s your suspect number one?”

  “He is.”

  Nigel offered Wright a cigarette and lit it for him. The smoke curling across Wright’s sallow face gave him a Mephistophelean look.

  “Well, what does Rebecca Loudron say?”

  “She doesn’t. Incommunicado. You seem to have driven her into fits. Dr. James put her to bed, gave her a sedative—says she’s not in a state to be interviewed yet. I have a man at her bedside.”

  “But, my dear chap, if Graham’s the murderer, how do you account for her doping the coffee? You’re not suggesting he and Rebecca were in it together?”

  “We’ve only Graham’s word for it that she did dope the coffee. Do you believe him?”

  “If his accusation was untrue, she’d have flown into a rage of indignation. Her reaction was very, very different.”

  “Well, damn it, if she did dope the coffee, that meant she and/or Walter Barn murdered the old man. Is that your idea?”

  “It doesn’t follow. I can think of a perfectly innocent reason for her administering the sleeping-draught. She’d probably tell us now, if only—no, we needn’t wait, we can ask Walter.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t.”

  “What?”

  “He’s disappeared.”

  “Oh lord, not another disappearance!”

  “He and his bicycle are missing. I went up there this morning. Another occupant of the house saw him go off early on his bike, with a knapsack: and he’s not back yet. Nothing sinister about it, probably.”

  “Talking of him and his bike——” Nigel told Wright what Rebecca had said about Walt’s departure on the night Sharon was killed.

  “So, if she was killed at the time we think she was, Barn could not have got there in time to do it,” said Wright slowly. “If Miss Loudron is telling the truth. Why the devil didn’t she mention this before?”

  “Possibly because the point seemed of no importance till I suggested that Sharon may have been killed because she knew something about Rebecca and Walt. Possibly those two really are guilty and Rebecca made this story up to strengthen his alibi.”

  “Dr. James’s gauntlet gloves,” said the inspector after a pause. “You know there are scratches on the back of them. Our laboratory chaps have found traces of nail varnish in the scratches, and particles of leather beneath the dead woman’s nails. They correspond.”

  “The blessings of science. All we need to know is who wore them. Any more enthralling pieces of evidence?”

  “Negative only. The D.D.I. of the manor Tooley Street’s in tells me none of his constables on the beat noticed Harold Loudron and his Jaguar the night Mrs. Loudron was killed. Mind you, that doesn’t break his alibi. He doesn’t remember which side street he parked in to let the alcoholic fumes dissipate. A Jag. would stick out like a sore thumb in any of those streets; but there’s a hell of a lot of ’em, and the police patrols wouldn’t cover them all during the period in question.”

  “You’ve eliminated Harold—in your own mind?”

  “I’ve eliminated nobody. That’s the hell of this case—it’s getting me dizzy. Too many motives, too many clues, and all pointing in every which direction. Even Harold—he could have pinched that silk stocking, he could have taken the gauntlet gloves and hidden them afterwards—he was in and out of Number 6 often enough. Dr. James has had the luck of the devil.”

  “Dr. James?” said Nigel, startled.

  “Oh, I don’t mean he’s the murderer. Though he might be. No, getting the body out of the house and into the river, without a soul seeing him.”

  “Yes, I agree.”

  “It couldn’t have been anyone else who moved the body.”

  “No.”

  Nigel was uncomfortably aware of his friend’s piercing eyes upon him.

  “What were you talking about to Dr. James and his sister this afternoon?” asked the inspector.

  “That very thing.”

  “He denied it?”

  Nigel hesitated. The lie with which he had elicited Dr. James’s confession lay heavily on his conscience. To lie to his old friend Wright was unthinkable.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Dr. James is my client. I can’t tell you about our conversation.”

  “You have told me.” The steel in Chief Inspector Wright came out, as he said coldly, “Well, I hope you know what you are doing,” and abruptly took his departure.

  Next morning was sunny. At eleven o’clock, when Clare was out shopping, Walt Barn turned up on Nigel’s doorstep. It was the first time Nigel had seen the young painter looking thoroughly worried. Walt told him he’d been down at Number 6, but they’d said Rebecca was ill and not allowed to have any visitors.

  “Why wasn’t I told before? Is she bad, do you know?”

  “You couldn’t be found yesterday.”

  “Oh lord, she did send for me then?”

  “No, the police were looking for you.”

  “Christ! she’s not—nothing’s happened to her?”

  “Nothing too serious, I hope. I’d better ring the police and reassure them you haven’t fled the country.”

  Walt stood by Nigel in the hall, while he rang up and left a message for Inspector Wright.

  “Let’s go into the park,” said Nigel. “I need some fresh air. Where were you all yesterday?”

  “I needed fresh air too. Bicycled out through Bromley. Wandered about in those woods—you know, on the right after you’ve turned off on to the Westerham road. Didn’t get back till late. What the hell do the coppers want with me now?”

  “I’ve no idea. Checking up again about the night Sharon was killed, maybe.”

  “I wish they’d get out of my hair. My mum always told me, Walt, she said, don’t you have nothing to do with that lot, she said. And she was right!”

  They were climbing up the steep grassy slope, Crooms Hill on their right, the park road to their left. At the top Nigel led his companion, who was breathing heavily, towards a wooden bench on the knoll. They sat down.

  In the clear air, all London seemed to be unrolled like a map below them. At their feet lay the consummate elegance of the Queen’s House, flanked by its colonnades, with the twin domes of the Palace towering up beyond it. The river sparkled like a crystal snake, winding its way round the Isle of Dogs, sinuously curving out of sight where it turned eastwards again beyond the West India Docks, Millwall and Poplar. Coloured funnels of steamers sticking up amongst the thousands of drab chimney pots. The attitudinising cranes. The huge flour mill dominating the middle distance. And then, away to the left, through the leafless trees, they could see Greenwich reach, a few ships on it tiny as Minitoys, on its way towards the Pool of London; and beyond it the dome of St. Paul’s glittered in the morning light, and Westminster Abbey was visible away to the north-west.

  “You know,” Walt remarked, “I never seen all this before. One hell of a panorama, isn’t it?” He gave his companion an odd look. “And he took him up on to a high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world—somehow like that it goes, doesn’t it?”

  “More or less. But I’m not the Devil, and I’m not going to tempt you. I didn’t know you were religious.”

  “My mum was. Regular old Bible-basher, when she wasn’t on the booze.”

  Nigel studied his companion for a moment. The cannon-ball head, the fringe of hair along his brow, the speedwell-blue eyes which flitted so restlessly from object to object, hard to pin down as butterflies; the cheeky, challenging expression of a slum child. Naïve though Rebecca Loudron was in ways, she seemed fully adult compared with Walt—this tough, brash young man who could be mischievous as a child, not from any inherent viciousness maybe, but because he had never lost the child’s irresponsibility and his need to make an impression.

  “Graham says he saw Rebecca put a sleepi
ng-powder in her father’s coffee,” Nigel quietly remarked.

  The blue eyes turned to him and flickered away.

  “So what?”

  “Did she?”

  “How should I know? You mean the night he was murdered? I wasn’t there—not at dinner, I mean.”

  “I know that. You were upstairs, in her room. Why do you have to be so evasive about it? Or aren’t you interested?”

  “The old catechism again.”

  “Rebecca didn’t deny it.”

  “Well, that’s her affair, isn’t it?”

  “You really are an extraordinary freak. The woman you’re supposed to be going to marry is accused of something which, if it’s true, could pretty well convict her of murder, and you say you’re not interested.”

  A badgered look came on Walt’s face. “Look, there’s no ‘supposed to be’ about it. After you and I had that dust-up, I had a think—it sort of cleared my mind—I went to see Becky and told her I’d go through with it.”

  ‘“Go through with it’?” Nigel chuckled. “That must have made her feel on top of the world.”

  “Don’t be so bloody daft! I didn’t put it like that.”

  “But it was what you meant?”

  Again, Walter shied away. “Look,” he said presently, “there’s quite a simple explanation of that stuff Becky gave the old man.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised. It was to put him to sleep, wasn’t it?” said Nigel without irony.

  “That’s right. She’d just had a hell of a barny with him. About us. He’d forbidden her to see me again, or else. Well, Becky sent for me and smuggled me upstairs. We’d come to a crisis—got to decide one way or the other. Defy the old—or break it up between us. Last thing Becky wanted was for him to come trotting upstairs and find me there and turf me out before she and I had had a regular old heart-to-heart and thrashed it all out.”

  “Which you did to the strains of Mozart?”

  “Some of the time. Why not?”

  “Why not indeed? You really are a bloody silly ape.”

  “Now what have I said?”

  “Not telling the police about this at the start.”

  “Oh, come off it. It’d be a cinch for them—if we’d told them it was Becky who doped the old man, they’d have jumped at the chance of arresting her, and me too, for murdering him.”

  “I suppose there’s no use telling you that people like Inspector Wright don’t jump at the chance of arresting anyone and everyone?”

  “No use at all. The poor bleeders want promotion, don’t they? D’you really suppose they’d have swallowed a story that Becky put her dad to sleep just so that she and I could have a nice long talk? Phooey!”

  “Well, I’m prepared to swallow it.”

  “You’re different. You’re human. More or less. Your mind doesn’t wear a uniform.”

  Nigel gave Walt a cigarette and lit it. “So now everyone is happy again.”

  “Don’t kid yourself.”

  “You’re still wondering if Rebecca might have killed her father before she came up to you?”

  “Oh, it’s not that.” Walt dismissed it with a wave of his cigarette. “Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. The old man had it coming to him anyway. Phoney old domestic tyrant.”

  “You’ve got more serious matters on your mind?”

  “Sure I have,” replied Walt, disregarding Nigel’s mild irony, or not noticing it. He gazed in silence at the great distances of London unrolled beneath them. “Funny, us coming up here,” he said at last. “Look at all that. The Smoke. Millions of houses and factories and shops and warehouses. Own just two or three of those millions, and you’re sitting pretty. Or are you?”

  “Are you, you mean?”

  “It’s a temptation. When you’re poor, anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “You say yes, but what do you know about the problems of the artist?”

  “Quite a lot. I live with one.”

  “That’s true. But Massinger’s made it. She’s a success, and she’s good. She doesn’t have to think about the right way for her, as an artist, to live: not any more.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

  “Now you probably think I’m a self-centred young bastard who tries to inflate a little scrap of talent with a lot of flash talk. Well, I dare say I throw my weight around a bit. But believe me, I’ve no use for the layabouts, the pub-crawlers, all those bearded wonders who think a paint-brush is for signing your name with. Me, I’d cut my grandmother’s throat if I knew I could paint better by doing it. But I don’t know. Oh, I can paint as well as the next man. But that’s not the point. It’s not good enough. What I worry about is whether I have it in me to paint better than the next man, and if I have, what kind of life I should live to give myself the best chance of doing so.”

  “Clare felt exactly the same when she was your age.”

  Walt’s eyes brightened. “Did she now? I’d never have believed it.” He relapsed again into his gloomy expression, hands loosely dangling between his knees.

  “Which brings us to Becky again,” Nigel prompted.

  “Yeah. Poor old Becky. And poor old Barn.” The words came out differently now, in jerks and rushes. “It’s not just a matter of her money—will it corrupt me, make me lazy, take the edge off things? Though that’s enough of a problem. No. It’s more complicated. I’ve a responsibility towards her, and a responsibility towards my work. If I let her down now, God knows what she mightn’t do. She takes things hard, you know. Abnormally, I’d say. I wouldn’t want to have her on my conscience. But suppose I go through with it and then find that my work peters out—I’d be blaming it on her, on our marriage, you see? and that would wreck the marriage. Well, suppose I pluck up courage and break it off now, and then find that my work still comes to nothing—that I’d hurt her mortally to no purpose—what sort of a heel d’you suppose I’d feel?”

  Nigel looked at him consideringly, then away to a tug towing its string of lighters on the Thames far below. “I think you’re putting up a comparatively unreal problem to conceal the real one which you daren’t face.”

  “O.K., teacher, chalk it up on the blackboard.”

  “In the first place you could quite easily dispose of the problem of Rebecca’s wealth, if you think that might be bad for your work.”

  “You mean——?”

  “Just take enough of the money for you and her to live on very simply. Give the rest away——”

  “To my fellow-artists, ha?” Walter laughed. “Corrupt them? Eliminate the competitors?”

  “——or keep it in the bank for your children, not touch it yourselves. Would Rebecca agree to that?”

  “Yes, she probably would. But——”

  “But that’s not the real problem either.”

  “Say on, professor.”

  “The real problem which you’re smoke-screening with these other ones, is simply this: do you or don’t you love her enough to risk everything for her—to gamble your most precious thing, your talent, on your love?”

  The young man was silent, pressing his hands together, his round face tightened in a sorrowful perplexity.

  “We must look like one of those Victorian problem pictures,” he said at last. “The Rustic Bench, or Shall He Emigrate?” He fell silent again, then burst out, “Love her? I don’t even know if I believe in love!”

  “Oh, bosh! You might as well say you don’t know if you believe in Greenwich Park. You’re in Greenwich Park—you’d bloody well better believe in it.”

  “She’d make a good wife,” said Walter presently. “She can cook and run a house and all that.”

  “Is she interested in your work?”

  “Well, because it’s my work. I can imagine her getting a damned sight too ambitious, on my behalf. I don’t like being pushed ahead.” His eyes flickered at Nigel. “D’you think she’s, well, quite normal? I mean, the way she blows her top sometimes, it scares me.”

  “If she had
a safety-valve, she wouldn’t blow her top.”

  “Meaning marriage? I wonder. What about Sharon and poor old Harold?”

  “What about them?”

  “She was married. Devoted husband—worshipped the ground she trod on and all that lark. Didn’t stop her bursting into flames whenever a pair of trousers came in sight. If I’d been Harold, I’d have wrung her neck long ago.”

  “Well, Rebecca isn’t Sharon, and Harold isn’t exactly like you either. Why drag them in?”

  “You’re talking about safety-valves. The way poor old Harold looked at her with those spaniel eyes—throw me that bone, please, when all the other dogs have had the meat off it—putting up with all her discontentedness and her lousy lovers—I ask you! Either he’s not a man at all, or he’d screwed down the safety-valve so hard that——”

  “That he finally blew up and killed her? Well, it’s a theory. But why should he kill his father?”

  “Does he have to have killed them both?”

  “Someone did.”

  “Well, poor old Harold needed the dough, from all I hear.”

  “So did you and Rebecca.”

  Walt Barn’s eyes danced audaciously at Nigel. “That hold you got on me the other day—can you teach me it?”

  “What, here?”

  “Yes.”

  Nigel demonstrated the hold, and then the blow to disarm a man with a knife. Walt was a quick learner.

  “Let’s have a fight,” he said presently. “No dirty stuff. See if I can throw you.”

  During the wrestling match that ensued, Nigel was made aware of Walt’s extraordinary competitiveness: the young man clearly took any form of contest with absurd seriousness. Nigel reflected, as they heaved and panted, how a few sons of the working-class overcompensate for the utter non-competitiveness of the rest.

  A park-keeper came pounding towards them, appalled by the spectacle of a young tough and a middle-aged gentleman locked in mortal combat. As he neared them, they hurled each other to the ground and started rolling down the hill. Blowing his whistle, the park-keeper followed, to come to a halt open-mouthed when the furious pair rose from the grass, dusted each other off, and proceeded amicably towards the Grooms Hill gate.

  “Well, I feel better for all that,” said Walter Barn. “But I still don’t know what to do about Becky.”