CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Francis Duncan
Title Page
PART ONE
Query: At the Time of the Corpse
PART TWO
Background: Before the Corpse
PART THREE
Exposition: Following the Corpse
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Adrian Carthallow, enfant terrible of the art world, is no stranger to controversy. But this time it’s not his paintings that have provoked a blaze of publicity – it’s the fact that his career has been suddenly terminated by a bullet to the head. Not only that, but his wife has confessed to firing the fatal shot.
Inspector Penross of the town constabulary is, however, less than convinced by Helen Carthallow’s story – but has no other explanation for the incident that occurred when the couple were in their clifftop house alone.
Luckily for the Inspector, amateur criminologist Mordecai Tremaine has an uncanny habit of being in the neighbourhood whenever sudden death makes its appearance. Investigating the killing, Tremaine is quick to realise that however handsome a couple the Carthallows were, and however extravagant a life they led, beneath the surface there’s a pretty devil’s brew . . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Francis Duncan is the pseudonym for William Underhill, who was born in 1918. He lived virtually all his life in Bristol and was a ‘scholarship boy’ boarder at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital school. Due to family circumstances he was unable to go to university and started work in the Housing Department of Bristol City Council. Writing was always important to him and very early on he published articles in newspapers and magazines. His first detective story was published in 1936.
In 1938 he married Sylvia Henly. Although a conscientious objector, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War II, landing in France shortly after D-Day. After the war he trained as a teacher and spent the rest of his life in education, first as a primary school teacher and then as a lecturer in a college of further education. In the 1950s he studied for an external economics degree from London University. No mean feat with a family to support; his daughter, Kathryn, was born in 1943 and his son, Derek, in 1949.
Throughout much of this time he continued to write detective fiction from ‘sheer inner necessity’, but also to supplement a modest income. He enjoyed foreign travel, particularly to France, and took up golf on retirement. He died of a heart attack shortly after celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1988.
ALSO BY FRANCIS DUNCAN IN THE MORDECAI TREMAINE SERIES
Murder Has a Motive
Murder for Christmas
Behold a Fair Woman
In at the Death
PART ONE
Query: At the Time of the Corpse
1
IT WAS A sharp sound that set the gulls wheeling with shrill, protesting cries.
Mordecai Tremaine opened his eyes. He saw only a yellow opaqueness hazily smudged with black. Reluctantly he lowered the newspaper from his face and peered sleepily around him, blinking in the sun.
Unless there was anyone concealed behind the scattered outcrops of rock running here and there down to the water’s edge he had the beach to himself. There was no other human figure visible along its flat, sanded length.
He twisted awkwardly in his deck-chair, staring up at the wall of cliff behind him. He could see no sign of movement on the path that zig-zagged its way up to where the grass verge and the wooden palings at the cliff edge formed a border to the sky.
A little to the right he could see the bridge. Viewed from this angle its air of spidery unreality always sent a shiver through him. It looked as though the first wild wind from the sea would snatch it from its moorings and send it twisting impotently into space.
The bridge, too, was deserted.
Mordecai Tremaine looked at the gulls reproachfully. The instant of panic had passed. They were planing gracefully over the sand or skimming the lines of surf, oblivious to the fact that they had broken into what had been a pleasurable nap.
He replaced the newspaper over his face and leaned back. The sun was soothingly warm. The shrill chattering of the gulls and the surge of the waves along the beach merged into a muted background lullaby into which a vague buzzing sound intruded itself for a few moments before dying away. He drifted happily into the cosy world between sleeping and waking.
It did not occur to him to look at his watch—a lapse for which he afterwards castigated himself bitterly—and he was never able to tell with accuracy how long it was before he became aware of the voice that was calling him back to active thought.
It was a woman’s voice. It was a level voice and yet a voice that was terrible in its very calmness, for it was the unnatural calm of hysteria held on a tight rein. It was saying:
“Please. Come quickly. Please. I’ve killed my husband.”
In the moment before Mordecai Tremaine opened his eyes lethargy fell away from him and left him in a state of icy awareness. For he knew now what had been the cause of that earlier sound that had aroused him.
He looked up at Helen Carthallow. She brushed the falling lock of hair from her eyes. She said, tonelessly:
“It was an accident. We were joking together. I pointed the gun at Adrian. It went off. I didn’t know it was loaded. Adrian said that it wasn’t.”
Mordecai Tremaine said:
“Have you told anyone else?”
She shook her head.
“No. I didn’t know what to do. There’s no one else in the house. And then I remembered you might be down here on the beach.”
Mordecai Tremaine lifted himself from his deck-chair.
“I think,” he said, “we’d better go up.”
They walked towards the cliffs. It was a fantastic walk that took them over yielding sands through a world that had suddenly become unreal. To Mordecai Tremaine it seemed that the warmth of the sun and the surge of the sea at his back belonged to another existence that he had known at some time that was incredibly remote.
He did not speak. He was watching Helen Carthallow, studying every movement of her slim, long-legged body. What he saw now might give him the secret of the tragedy that lay behind her presence even if she said no word.
She hurried towards the path. She kept a little in front of him, with her face averted as though she did not want to meet his eyes. He wondered whether her tenseness was the natural reaction of a woman who had encountered catastrophe and dared not give way to any kind of emotion lest it prove too much for her self-control, or whether she was a woman who had something to hide and was fearful of making a slip that might betray her.
As he followed her slowly up the cliff steps Mordecai Tremaine found himself thinking that he had never been sure of Helen Carthallow. He had never been certain just what kind of person she was. And he had never been able to understand why she had married Adrian Carthallow or what was Carthallow’s real attitude towards her.
Before they had gone a third of the way he was recognizing pantingly that he was no longer a young man. Besides, a tobacconist, which was what he had been before he had been able to retire and live upon a modest income, did not have much opportunity for exercise beyond an occasional climb to the higher shelves.
The distance between them increased, so that she reached the top of the steps some moments before him. He saw her glance hurriedly about her and then she turned, and the dark eyes, screened by the long lashes, looked down at him.
The lock of hair that was continually falling across her forehead served now to conceal her expression. She said:
“There’s no one here.”
He wondered as he climbed th
e last few steps why she had made that remark. She did not add to it and her face told him nothing. She waited for him to draw level and they crossed the cliff top and went down into the sheltered cutting in the rock in which lay the entrance to the bridge.
Helen Carthallow pushed open the iron gate. The bridge vibrated beneath their weight. Mordecai Tremaine glanced down. The beach, with its fringe of rocks, seemed a long way off. He was relieved when they reached the far side.
The bridge always affected him strangely. He knew, of course, that it was the result of an over-active imagination. But it always gave him the feeling that he was adventuring into realms where fantastic things might happen and that he was linked to the sober world in which law and policemen existed only by a gossamer structure that might vanish before he could return.
The house called Paradise had been built and named by a millionaire for his bride. Just what had happened there few men had learned, but there had been whispers that there had been a lover in the case and it was an undoubted fact that the mistress of the house had been found lying with a broken neck at the foot of the cliffs whither she had apparently flung herself after leaving a despairing note that had not been made public.
Paradise had been closed and the millionaire had gone away—to take an overdose of veronal two years later after his fortune had vanished in a financial crash that had brought down a continental government.
For many years the place had lain empty and neglected, with the thick mists and the driving rain closing in upon it in winter when the seas leaped in fury up the grey cliffs upon which it stood; and with the summer sun beating down upon the rank wilderness of its gardens and peeling the paint from its doors and windows and the long, wooden verandah that looked out over the Atlantic.
It possessed so many obvious disadvantages. It was situated upon a great mass of cliff that must at one time have been joined to the mainland but that was now separated from it by a narrow but deep chasm through which when the tide was high the sea ran noisily. It could be reached only by the bridge, which was not wide enough to take a car.
And, inevitably, there was its reputation that made it a place to be avoided. The local people said that sometimes you could hear the thin, unhappy crying of a tortured soul that had been driven to self-destruction; only the sceptics sneered that it was odd that the sound was heard only when the wind was sighing over the cliffs and humming between the suspension wires of the bridge.
Adrian Carthallow had found the house by chance whilst motoring in Cornwall and had bought it for the song for which such property was to be obtained in those days.
Whatever else might be said of Carthallow it was undeniable that he was an artist and that he possessed the gift of imagination. Paradise had appealed to his love of the flamboyant. Besides, to be the owner of a house with a history and literally perched in the Atlantic, had offered an opportunity of valuable publicity to a painter who was still busily acquiring the reputation of a man whose work was worth cultivating.
As Mordecai Tremaine followed the woman who had startled him by her flat statement that she was now Carthallow’s widow his mind was projecting a series of vivid images, tracing the man’s career from obscurity to the latest garish fame.
It was garish. Adrian Carthallow was not—had not been—the kind of man nor had he painted the kind of pictures to enable him to bask in the mellow light of a success that gave offence to none.
They were within sight now of the door of the house. The headland was larger than it appeared at first glance and a long drive led from the bridge through an attractively planned garden.
Trees and shrubs had been planted to shield the house and break the force of the wind. A turn in the path had hidden the point at which they had crossed from the mainland and the sense of remoteness and isolation was complete. Mordecai Tremaine looked up at the blue sky and saw himself ringed with trees that effectively blocked the rest of the world from his sight.
Helen Carthallow went into the house. She crossed the narrow hall, passing the open door of the lounge. And then, suddenly, she stopped and stood waiting by the long room overlooking the sea where a gap had been made in the sheltering trees and that her husband had used as a study and library.
Mordecai Tremaine stepped past her and he drew in his breath at what he saw.
There was no doubt that she was a widow. Adrian Carthallow lay sprawled upon his face on the floor and the back of his head was a very unpleasant thing to see.
A desk stood in the centre of the room and beside it there was an overturned chair. On the edge of the desk was a revolver. It was a heavy Webley of Service pattern.
Mordecai Tremaine glanced at the woman who still stood in the doorway.
“Is this—?”
She nodded.
“Yes. I put it there after—after—it happened.”
He looked about the room. Apart from that overturned chair and the sprawled body there was no immediate sign of disturbance. On the right-hand side of the desk there were three drawers. There was a key in the lock of the centre drawer, one of a bunch that dangled from a ring. He said, although he already knew the answer:
“Did he always keep the gun in his desk?”
“Yes.”
The scarlet lips that made a vivid gash in the whiteness of her face hardly seemed to quiver. He barely heard what she said.
“We shall have to notify the police, of course,” he told her. He added quietly: “Before we do that is there anything you would like me to know?”
There was a flicker of fear in her eyes. He saw it before she could make the apparently innocent little movement of her head that brought down the concealing lock of hair.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t mean anything,” he said. “If you don’t. Will you show me the telephone?”
She took him into the hall. Lying on a table was a circular that had evidently come by the day’s post. He glanced at it casually, noting that the envelope had not been opened.
He had known that the house possessed a telephone but he was not aware of its exact location. She showed him the cabinet in which the instrument was concealed. He did not have to search for the number of the local police station.
It was the sergeant who answered.
“Is Inspector Penross there, Sergeant? He is? Ask him to speak to me please.”
And when the inspector’s strong voice came over the wire:
“This is Tremaine, Inspector. I’m at Paradise. Mr. Carthallow is dead. Yes—dead. He’s been shot. Mrs. Carthallow is with me.”
The telephone crackled agitatedly for a few seconds. He said:
“Yes. Of course. No. Of course.”
He replaced the receiver.
“The inspector is coming out at once. He wants us to stay here until he arrives. He doesn’t want us to touch anything.”
“I understand,” she said.
Her voice trembled and he realized that her self-control was almost gone. He realized, too, that there had been antagonism in his own manner. He felt a twinge of conscience.
“There isn’t anything we can do for the moment,” he said, more gently. “Suppose we sit down somewhere until the inspector comes? This must have been a terrible shock for you.”
She clutched at the word with an eagerness that surprised him with its sudden element of the pathetic. He thought of a small girl who was desperately anxious to be comforted.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it was a great shock. When I saw Adrian—”
She broke off and turned away from him. He followed her into the lounge across the hall. She sat down in an easy chair facing the window. He said:
“Perhaps a cigarette would help.”
She took one with an unsteady hand from the case he held out. He lit it for her and as she lay back against her cushion he chose a chair a little to her right so that he could study her without making her conscious of his scrutiny.
He was trying to analyse his thoughts; trying to discover the reason f
or the mistrust that persisted in breaking the surface of his mind.
She was smoking her cigarette with quick, nervous puffs, without inhaling, so that the tobacco created a hazy screen, through which he could not be sure of her expression. Did she look and act like a woman who had just accidentally shot and killed her husband?
Mordecai Tremaine admitted that since his acquaintance with wives who had just killed their husbands was of the slightest he was hardly in a position to put forward a definite opinion. He wondered what his own reaction would be were he a wife who had just performed so untimely a deed. He thought he would be stunned and bewildered by what he had done. But he also thought that he would want to talk. He would want to repeat his story of what had happened over and over again. He would want to relieve the torment of his soul.
However, that was pure conjecture, after all. And in any case, no two people could be depended upon to react in just the same way.
A good deal, of course, would depend upon whether the wife had been in love with her husband. Some wives might secretly welcome the sudden removal of their partner from the sphere of the living.
He knew why his thoughts had travelled such a road. Lester Imleyson. Or rather, Helen Carthallow and Lester Imleyson.
Deliberately he shut his mind upon any further wanderings in that direction. He must deal with facts. Sometimes preconceived theories had a habit of getting mixed up with the things that had really happened so that they produced results which were altogether false.
Helen Carthallow said, suddenly, through the smoke haze:
“I’m terribly sorry for dragging you into all this.”
“I wish I could do something to help,” he told her. He took advantage of the opening she had given him. He said: “You came straight down to the beach? You didn’t think of the telephone?”
He was expecting that she might hesitate but she answered him immediately.
“No—I didn’t think of the telephone. I suppose I was too confused. And I wanted to have someone with me. I—I couldn’t stand being in the house alone. Then I thought you might still be on the beach. I noticed you there when I was crossing the bridge on the way in.”
So Pretty a Problem Page 1
