The face of a stranger

by Anne Perry

  Evan flushed faintly and his hazel eyes looked suddenly awkward.

  "I'm afraid we didn't find out, sir. I mean, the people we asked didn't seem to recall clearly; some said they remembered something about a watch, others that they didn't. We couldn't get a description of one. We wondered if he might have pawned it too; but we didn't find a ticket, and we tried the local pawnshops."

  "Nothing?"

  Evan shook his head. "Nothing at all, sir."

  "So we wouldn't know it, even if it turned up?" Monk said disappointedly, jerking his hand at the door. "Some miserable devil could walk in here sporting it, and we should be none the wiser. Still, I daresay if the killer took it, he will have thrown it into the river when the hue and cry went up anyway. If he didn't he's too daft to be out on his own." He twisted around to look at the pile of papers again and riffled through them untidily. "What else is there?"

  The next was the account of the neighbor opposite, one Albert SCarsdale, very bare and prickly. Obviously he had resented the inconsideration, the appalling bad taste of Grey in getting himself murdered in Mecklenburg Square, and felt the less he said about it himself the sooner it would be forgotten, and the sooner he might dissociate himself from the whole sordid affair.

  He admitted he thought he had heard someone in the hallway between his apartment and that of Grey at about eight o'clock, and possibly again at about quarter to ten. He could not possibly say whether it was two separate visitors or one arriving and then later leaving; in fact he was not sure beyond doubt that it had not been a stray animal, a cat, or the porter making a round—from his

  choice of words he regarded the two as roughly equal. It might even have been an errand boy who had lost his way, or any of a dozen other things. He had been occupied with his own interests, and had seen and heard nothing of remark. The statement was signed and affirmed as being true with an ornate and ill-natured signature.

  Monk looked across at Evan, still waiting by the window.

  "Mr. Scarsdale sounds like an officious and unhelpful little beggar," he observed dryly.

  "Very, sir," Evan agreed, his eyes shining but no smile touching his lips. "I imagine it's the scandal in the buildings; attracts notice from the wrong kind of people, and very bad for the social reputation."

  "Something less than a gentleman." Monk made an immediate and cruel judgment.

  Evan pretended not to understand him, although it was a patent lie.

  "Less than a gentleman, sir?" His face puckered.

  Monk spoke before he had time to think, or wonder why he was so sure.

  "Certainly. Someone secure in his social status would not be affected by a scandal whose proximity was only a geographical accident, and nothing to do with him personally. Unless, of course, he knew Grey well?"

  "No sir," Evan said, but his eyes showed his total comprehension. Obviously Scarsdale still smarted under Grey's contempt, and Monk could imagine it vividly. "No, he disclaimed all personal acquaintance with him. And either that's a lie or else it's very odd. If he were the gentleman he pretends to be, he would surely know Grey, at least to speak to. They were immediate neighbors, after all."

  Monk did not want to court disappointment.

  "It may be no more than social pretension, but worth inquiring into." He looked at the papers again. "What else is there?" He glanced up at Evan. "Who found him, by the way?"

  Evan came over and sorted out two more reports from the bottom of the pile. He handed them to Monk.

  "Cleaning woman and the porter, sir. Their accounts agree, except that the porter says a bit more, because naturally we asked him about the evening as well."

  Monk was temporarily lost. "As well?"

  Evan flushed faintly with irritation at his own lack of clarity.

  "He wasn't found until the following morning, when the woman who cleans and cooks for him arrived and couldn't get in. He wouldn't give her a key, apparently didn't trust her; he let her in himself, and if he wasn't there then she just went away and came another time. Usually he leaves some message with the porter."

  "I see. Did he go away often? I assume we know where to?" There was an instinctive edge of authority to his voice now, and impatience.

  "Occasional weekend, so for as the porter knows; sometimes longer, a week or two at a country house, in the season," Evan answered.

  "So what happened when Mrs.—what's her name?— arrived?"

  Evan stood almost to attention. "Huggins. She knocked as usual, and when she got no answer after the third attempt, she went down to see the porter, Grimwade, to find out if there was a message. Grimwade told her he'd seen Grey arrive home the evening before, and he hadn't gone out yet, and to go back and try again. Perhaps Grey had been in the bathroom, or unusually soundly asleep, and no doubt he'd be standing at the top of the stairs by now, wanting his breakfast."

  "But of course he wasn't," Monk said unnecessarily.

  "No. Mrs. Huggins came back a few minutes later all fussed and excited—these women love a little drama—and demanded that Grimwade do something about it. To her endless satisfaction"—Evan smiled bleakly—"she said that he'd be lying there murdered in his own blood, and they should do something immediately, and call the police. She

  must have told me that a dozen times." He pulled a small face. "She's now convinced she has the second sight, and I spent a quarter of an hour persuading her that she should stick to cleaning and not give it up in favor of fortune-telling—although she's already a heroine, of sorts, in the local newspaper—and no doubt the local pub!"

  Monk found himself smiling too.

  "One more saved from a career in the fairground stalls— and still in the service of the gentry," he said. "Heroine for a day—and free gin every time she retells it for the next six months. Did Grimwade go back with her?"

  "Yes, with a master key, of course."

  "And what did they find, exactly?" This was perhaps the most important single thing: the precise facts of the discovery of the body.

  Evan concentrated till Monk was not sure if he was remembering the witness's words or his own sight of the rooms.

  "The small outer hall was perfectly orderly," Evan began. "Usual things you might expect to see, stand for coats and things, and hats, rather a nice stand for sticks, umbrellas and so forth, box for boots, a small table for calling cards, nothing else. Everything was neat and tidy. The door from that led directly into the sitting room; and the bedroom and utilities were off that." A shadow passed over his extraordinary face. He relaxed a little and half unconsciously leaned against the window frame.

  "That next room was a different matter altogether. The curtains were drawn and the gas was still burning, even though it was daylight outside. Grey himself was lying half on the floor and half on the big chair, head downward. There was a lot of blood, and he was in a pretty dreadful state." His eyes did not waver, but it was with an effort, and Monk could see it. "I must admit," he continued, "I've seen a few deaths, but this was the most brutal, by a long way. The man had been beaten to death with something quite thin—I mean not a bludgeon—hit a great many times. There had pretty obviously been a fight. A small

  table had been knocked over and one leg broken off, several ornaments were on the floor and one of the heavy stuffed chairs was on its back, the one he was half on." Evan was frowning at the memory, and his skin was pale. "The other rooms hadn't been touched." He moved his hands in a gesture of negation. "It was quite a while before we could get Mrs. Huggins into a sane state of mind, and then persuade her to look at the kitchen and bedroom; but eventually she did, and said they were just as she had left them the previous day."

  Monk breathed in deeply, thinking. He must say something intelligent, not some fatuous comment on the obvious. Evan was watching him, waiting. He found himself self-conscious.

  "So it would appear he had a visitor some time in the evening," he said more tentatively than he had wished. "Who quarreled with him, or else simply attacked him. There was a violent light
, and Grey lost."

  "More or less," Evan agreed, straightening up again. "At least we don't have anything else to go on. We don't even know if it was a stranger, or someone he knew."

  "No sign of a forced entry?"

  "No sir. Anyway, no burglar is likely to force an entry into a house when all the lights are still on."

  "No." Monk cursed himself for an idiotic question. Was he always such a fool? There was no surprise in Evan's face. Good manners? Or fear of angering a superior not noted for tolerance? "No, of course not," he said aloud. "I suppose he wouldn't have been surprised by Grey, and then lit the lights to fool us?"

  "Unlikely sir. If he were that coolheaded, he surely would have taken some of the valuables? At least the money in Grey's wallet, which would be untraceable."

  Monk had no answer for that. He sighed and sat down behind the desk. He did not bother to invite Evan to sit also. He read the rest of the porter's statement.

  Lamb had asked exhaustively about all visitors the previous evening, if there had been any errand boys, messengers, even a stray animal. Grimwade was affronted at the very suggestion. Certainly not: errand boys were always escorted to the appropriate place, or if possible their errands taken over by Grimwade himself. No stray animal had ever tainted the buildings with its presence—dirty things, stray animals, and apt to soil the place. What did the police think he was—were they trying to insult him?

  Monk wondered what Lamb had replied. He would certainly have had a pointed answer to the man on the relative merits of stray animals and stray humans! A couple of acid retorts rose to his mind even now.

  Grimwade swore there had been two visitors and only two. He was perfectly sure no others had passed his window. The first was a lady, at about eight o'clock, and he would sooner not say upon whom she called; a question of private affairs must be treated with discretion, but she had not visited Mr. Grey, of that he was perfectly certain. Anyway, she was a very slight creature, and could not possibly have inflicted die injuries suffered by the dead man. The second visitor was a man who called upon a Mr. Yeats, a longtime resident, and Grimwade had escorted him as far as the appropriate landing himself and seen him received.

  Whoever had murdered Grey had obviously either used one of the other visitors as a decoy or else had already been in the building in some guise in which he had so far been overlooked. So much was logic.

  Monk put the paper down. They would have to question Grimwade more closely, explore even the minutest possibilities; there might be something.

  Evan sat down on the window ledge.

  Mrs. Huggins's statement was exacdy as Evan had said, if a good deal more verbose. Monk read it only because he wanted time to think.

  Afterwards he picked up the last one, the medical report. It was the one he found most unpleasant, but maybe also the most necessary. It was written in a small, precise hand, very round. It made him imagine a small doctor

  with round spectacles and very clean ringers. It did not occur to him until afterwards to wonder if he had ever known such a person, and if it was the first wisp of memory returning.

  The account was clinical in the extreme, discussing the corpse as if Joscelin Grey were a species rather than an individual, a human being full of passions and cares, hopes and humors who had been suddenly and violently cut off from life, and who must have experienced terror and extreme pain in the few minutes that were being examined so unemotionally.

  The body had been looked at a little after nine thirty a.m. It was that of a man in his early thirties, of slender build but well nourished, and not apparently suffering from any illness or disability apart from a fairly recent wound in the upper part of the right leg, which might have caused him to limp. The doctor judged it to be a shallow wound, such as he had seen in many ex-soldiers, and to be five or six months old. The body had been dead between eight and twelve hours; he could not be more precise than that.

  The cause of death was obvious for anyone to see: a succession of violent and powerful blows about the head and shoulders with some long, thin instrument. A heavy cane or stick seemed the most likely.

  Monk put down the report, sobered by the details of death. The bare language, shorn of all emotion, perversely brought the very feeling of it closer. His imagination saw it sharply, even smelled it, conjuring up the sour odor and the buzz of flies. Had he dealt with many murders? He could hardly ask.

  "Very unpleasant," he said without looking up at Evan.

  "Very," Evan agreed, nodding. "Newspapers made rather a lot of it at the time. Been going on at us for not having found the murderer. Apart from the fact that it's made a lot of people nervous, Mecklenburg Square is a pretty good area, and if one isn't safe there, where is one safe? Added to that, Joscelin Grey was a well-liked, pretty harmless young ex-officer, and of extremely good family.

  He served in the Crimea and was invalided out. He had rather a good record, saw the Charge of the Light Brigade, badly wounded at Sebastopol." Evan's face pinched a little with a mixture of embarrassment and perhaps pity. “A lot of people feel his country has let him down, so to speak, first by allowing this to happen to him, and then by not even catching the man who did it." He looked across at Monk, apologizing for the injustice, and because he understood it. "I know that's unfair, but a spot of crusading sells newspapers; always helps to have a cause, you know! And of course the running patterers have composed a lot of songs about it—returning hero and all that!"

  Monk's mouth turned down at the corners.

  "Have they been hitting hard?"

  "Rather," Evan admitted with a little shrug. "And we haven't a blind thing to go on. WeVe been over and over every bit of evidence there is, and there's simply nothing to connect him to anyone. Any ruffian could have come in from the street if he dodged the porter. Nobody saw or heard anything useful, and we are right where we started." He got up gloomily and came over to the table.

  "I suppose you'd better see the physical evidence, not that there is much. And then I daresay you'd like to see the flat, at least get a feeling for the scene?"

  Monk stood up also.

  "Yes I would. You never know, something might suggest itself." Although he could imagine nothing. If Lamb had not succeeded, and this keen, delicate young junior, what was he going to find? He felt failure begin to circle around him, dark and enclosing. Had Runcorn given him this knowing he would fail? Was it a discreet and efficient way of getting rid of him without being seen to be callous? How did he even know for sure that Runcorn was not an old enemy? Had he done him some wrong long ago? The possibility was cold and real. The shadowy outline of himself that had appeared so far was devoid of any quick acts of compassion, any sudden gentlenesses or warmth to seize hold of and to like. He was discovering himself as a

  stranger might, and what he saw so far did not excite his admiration. He liked Evan far more than he liked himself.

  He had imagined he had hidden his complete loss of memory, but perhaps it was obvious, perhaps Runcorn had seen it and taken this chance to even some old score? God, how he wished he knew what kind of man he was, had been. Who loved him, who hated him—and who had what cause? Had he ever loved a woman, or any woman loved him? He did not even know that!

  Evan was walking quickly ahead of him, his long legs carrying him at a surprisingly fast pace. Everything in Monk wanted to trust him, and yet he was almost paralyzed by his ignorance. Every foothold he trod on dissolved into quicksand under his weight. He knew nothing. Everything was surmise, constantly shifting guesses.

  He behaved automatically, having nothing but instinct and ingrained habit to rely on.

  The physical evidence was astonishingly bare, set out like luggage in a lost-and-found office, ownerless; pathetic and rather embarrassing remnants of someone else's life, robbed now of their purpose and meaning—a little like his own belongings in Grafton Street, objects whose history and emotion were obliterated.

  He stopped beside Evan and picked up a pile of clothes. The trousers were
dark, well cut from expensive material, now spotted with blood. The boots were highly polished and only slightly worn on the soles. Personal linen was obviously changed very recently; shirt was expensive; cravat silk, the neck and front heavily stained. The jacket was tailored to high fashion, but ruined with blood, and a ragged tear in the sleeve. They told him nothing except a hazard at the size and build of Joscelin Grey, and an admiration for his pocket and his taste. There was nothing to be deduced from the bloodstains, since they already knew what the injuries had been.

  He put them down and turned to Evan, who was watching him.

  "Not very helpful, is it, sir?" Evan looked at them with

  a mixture of unhappiness and distaste. There was something in his face that might have been real pity. Perhaps he was too sensitive to be a police officer.

  "No, not very," Monk agreed dryly. "What else was there?"

  "The weapon, sir." Evan reached out and picked up a heavy ebony stick with a silver head. It too was encrusted with blood and hair.

  Monk winced. If he had seen such grisly things before, his immunity to them had gone with his memory.

  "Nasty." Evan's mouth turned down, his hazel eyes on Monk's face.

  Monk was conscious of him, and abashed. Was the distaste, the pity, for him? Was Evan wondering why a senior officer should be so squeamish? He conquered his revulsion with an effort and took the stick. It was unusually heavy.

  "War wound," Evan observed, still watching him. "From what witnesses say, he actually walked with it: I mean it wasn't an ornament."

  "Right leg." Monk recalled the medical report. "Accounts for the weight." He put the stick down. "Nothing else?"

  "Couple of broken glasses, sir, and a decanter broken too. Must have been on the table that was knocked over, from the way it was lying; and a couple of ornaments. There's a drawing of the way the room was, in Mr. Lamb's file, sir. Not that I know of anything it can tell us. But Mr. Lamb spent hours poring over it."