Sleep of Death

by Anne Morice

  “I have to say that it would have deterred me.”

  “That’s because, as I’m always telling you, Toby, you have such a nice, simple, honest and straightforward mind. Having married Dolly in the first place and put up with her for all those years, you would doubtless have settled for continuing to do so, however jealous and domineering she became, sooner than face a lonely and poverty-stricken old age; but, from Philip’s point of view, she had played straight into his hands. She had not only removed the last and most dangerous obstacle, she had made it possible for him to murder her with impunity and to keep the money as well.”

  “Can you follow this rigmarole, Robin?”

  “Yes, but I think you had better leave it to Tessa to do the explaining. Something tells me she is going to, anyway, so you may as well hear it once, instead of twice.”

  “That is very true!”

  “Let me try to make it easier for you,” I said, “by sketching in some of the background, and the first point to remember is that, although the murder itself was swift and violent, the planning that had gone into it beforehand and the wall of falsehood which was constructed round it afterwards were the reverse of that. It had started weeks earlier, you see, with Philip systematically building up his own defence in advance.”

  “With his now celebrated act of rushing headlong into senility, I suppose you are going to say? Such a wobbly old party that he could scarcely climb the stairs without help, so that when the time came no-one would believe he’d had the strength to tie the knot tight enough?”

  “Right! And you may also remember my telling you how dismayed we all were to discover how much he had aged. It seemed like madness to have offered him the part, in his condition. But, in fact, it was only after the contract was signed that the deterioration set in. So that was the groundwork and he gave an admirably sustained performance, never allowing the mask to slip in public for a moment and growing visibly more dependent every day on Dolly. However, in my opinion, the timing was the really clever stroke. There was true artistry in that.”

  “I didn’t notice anything particularly artistic about it.”

  “But can’t you see how effectively it helped to divert suspicion away from him? There he was, after years on the edge of the wilderness, poised for a brilliant come-back, the leading role in a new West End production, no less. So, if he had been planning to kill his wife, how could he have elected to do so just twenty-four hours before the opening night, he who had so much to lose by the disruption and postponement which would inevitably follow? Surely, it would be argued, he would have waited until the play had either flopped, or settled down into a comfortable run? All this, plus the fact that he no longer benefited financially from her death should have been, and very nearly was, enough to clinch his innocence. As a matter of fact, he didn’t give a damn about what happened to the play, or Oliver’s chances, or any of the rest of us, come to that, which is the chief reason why I have so few regrets. You see, he’d already set up a cosy retirement for himself, which was all that mattered to him, although one can’t help feeling a sneaking admiration, as well. The choice of that particular time hadn’t been on the original agenda, which makes it even more impressive. There’d been a previous attempt, which failed. However, that’s part of two other stories.”

  “In which order do we get them?”

  “I don’t know yet. They have their place later in the story, but first we come to those wheels which couldn’t be set in motion until after Dolly was dead, in other words the fabrication of false evidence. It came in two separate packages and Philip started emptying out the first one before the crime was discovered. He also managed, incidentally, by a series of small manoeuvres, to delay its discovery by an extra hour or two, thus making it that much more difficult to establish the exact time of death. But his main object in coming along to my room that evening, ostensibly to ask if we’d seen Dolly, was to get it through to us that she never came to the theatre with him on such occasions. She dropped him off there and came back to collect him just before the curtain. I don’t know whether I was the only one to find that incongruous. You might have thought it would be the one time when her presence would be most essential. Furthermore, it was a break in the normal routine which had certainly never been mentioned in my hearing and, stranger still, neither Oliver nor Pete knew about it. I ought to have realised at once that Pete, in particular, who was always so well informed about her movements, would be in the know, would have made it his business in fact, to check on it, since he was planning to go to the flat at nine o’clock for a short burst of safe-breaking.”

  “And Oliver too, as you rightly point out, would presumably have made a few enquiries on the subject before setting forth on a similar errand. I am disappointed in Oliver, you know. I had quite set my heart on him for the villain of the piece.”

  “Oh no, Toby, far too vacillating and irresolute. He might have longed to murder her, probably did, but when it came to the point he would never have had the guts.”

  “But how about all those quaint stories he kept unfolding to you?”

  “Yes, I know, they did take a bit of swallowing, and at one point I got hooked on the idea that he and Benjie were working as a team, covering up for each other, because Dolly had caught a whiff of Sir Joseph’s impending collapse and was threatening to spread it around, if Oliver didn’t do her bidding. That would have meant ruin for both of them, so it wasn’t a bad motive in its way, but what one has to remember about Oliver is that he may be wet, but he’s not dishonest. With the exception of his first version of the fake burglary, when he was in a state of shock, every one of those quaint stories was true.”

  “There now! And who was the joker who took the keys off him?”

  “Can’t you guess? You know how neurotically jealous Pete is and how wide and deep the chip on his shoulder. He had a kind of fixation about Oliver, who was exactly the type to bring out the worst of his inferiority complex and who had once had a minor fling with Clarrie and still brought her roses. As a matter of fact, Benjie was working up to becoming a far more serious contender, but Pete didn’t know that and not being invited to Oliver’s party was the last straw. He was convinced that it was part of a plot to break things up between him and Clarrie. So when he’d been brooding about it for several hours in his dreary little cottage, he jumped in the car, drove up to London and parked it in Oliver’s courtyard. As far as I can make out, the intention was to burst into the house, hold up the party and more or less drag Clarrie away by force, but before he could get started on this programme the front door opened and Oliver and I came out.

  “He guessed we were on our way to find a taxi and that therefore Oliver would shortly be returning on his own and this gave him an idea for an even more amusing form of revenge. He left the car and positioned himself in the shadow of the wall beside the archway and when Oliver came through he sprang on him from behind, pinioned him face down on the ground and went through his pockets. He’s very deft and co-ordinated, as you know and the entire operation only took a few seconds. He has a delicate touch too and Oliver was scarcely hurt at all, just a few minor scratches and bruises, but he was scared out of his mind and trembling like a jelly, which was exactly what Pete wanted. In fact, the original idea had been to go back and wait in the car for another ten minutes, while his victim sweated it out and went through the performance of ringing the police and credit card firms and so on. Then he was going to push all the stuff through the letter box and drive away, the cream of the joke being that when the police arrived they’d find a completely unscathed Oliver, with all the stolen goods lying on a mat in the hall. However, as you know, it didn’t turn out that way.

  “Oliver didn’t dare report the loss of the credit cards because it would have required him to inform the police as well, and he couldn’t do that in case it should lead to the discovery that he’d been carrying a set of Philip’s keys around with him, and it was this discovery which caused Pete to think again. He went through
the haul to while away the time, and he recognised the keys straight off, for the best of reasons. So this required thought, but he dared not hang about in the yard, so long as there was a chance of the police turning up, so he whizzed off, parked the car in its usual place near the shop and dossed down for the night on an antique four-poster bed.”

  “Came the dawn and . . .”

  “And he’d devised a new plan. He realised that there was unlikely to be an innocent explanation for the keys being in Oliver’s pocket, but at the same time he was the last man on earth to co-operate with the police or turn someone in. On the other hand, his prejudice against Oliver was almost as rampant and he had no intention of letting him off the hook by meekly handing back the evidence. He decided to return to Martingale Close, push everything through the letter box, with the exception of the keys, Oliver’s own, as well as the Mickletons’, meaning to hang on to these until he’d found a really clever use for them. He fancied this would give him a strange and demonic power over his enemy, as indeed it did. However, by one of those coincidences with which life is so chock-a-block, he had no sooner arrived and started reconnoitring the surroundings than out steps Oliver once again, this time on his way to collect the Sunday papers. It was a sight which produced in Pete an irresistible urge to give the knife another twist in the wound and within seconds he was inside the house, planting his new tease. You know what followed from that.”

  “Yes, he’s a right bundle of mischief, isn’t he? Did he tell you all this himself?”

  “Clarrie and I got it out of him between us. It wasn’t too difficult because it was exactly the sort of cruel game which needed someone of Pete’s temperament and physique to carry out successfully and, as far as I was concerned, he might just as well have put his signature on the note he left in the typewriter. Also I have to confess that I did inject a hint or two that I was better informed about his early career than he might suppose and wasn’t above using a modicum of blackmail myself, should the need arise.”

  “Yes, you would stoop to anything, I daresay. What was in Philip’s second packet?”

  “What? Oh yes, that one was filled with all the rot about Dolly’s hypochondria. It struck me at the time as being out of character, but he edged it in so cleverly, not giving it any emphasis or elaboration, but as though stating a well-known fact. As there seemed no point in inventing it, I assumed it was true. The rather subtle part was the way he conned me into getting that indigestion mixture analysed.”

  “I am afraid you have overtaken me now because I still don’t see what point there was in inventing it.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to and it didn’t begin to get through to me until after Paula’s letter arrived and things had started falling into place. In a sense, I did it by starting at the end and working backwards. How would it be, I asked myself, if he and Paula had organised the murder as a team? And straightaway came the answer to one bothersome question: why did Philip take it so calmly when he was told about Dolly’s will? I realised that, if he had murdered her, he would have to put on a show of not being shocked or disappointed, since ignorance of its terms would still have left his motive intact, but he didn’t get it right. Either overplayed, or underplayed perhaps, and some intuition told me that he genuinely was satisfied with the way things had turned out. This gave me an idea about the hypochondria, which also seemed to make sense, but the trouble there was that I could only verify it by prising some information out of your friend, Dr. Macintosh, and I couldn’t see any way of getting round him to part with it. However, the chance to give it a try more or less fell into my lap and when it came to the point it wasn’t so tricky as I’d anticipated. I have sometimes found that you can get people to give things away, which they hadn’t meant to tell you, simply by stating the reverse of what you believe to be true and so provoking them into contradicting you. It worked this time and he made it clear that Dolly had shown no sign of contracting imaginary illnesses until almost the end of her life.”

  “And what was so thrilling about that?”

  “It supported my theory that there’d been an earlier attempt to murder her and that Philip had muffed it. Following Paula’s directions and using drugs supplied by her and therefore untraceable in this country, he first induced a hefty bilious attack and followed it up by substituting very strong barbiturates for the pills Dr. Macintosh had prescribed. It should have been lethal, but he had either misunderstood the instructions, or else she was a lot stronger than either of them had bargained for. Anyway, the only result was that she became even more violently sick and started bleating that it was the medicine which was causing it. So that called for a quick switch of plan and the birth of the myth about her hypochondria, just in case someone were to remember the incident when she later died, either in a way which had been set up to look like suicide, or in the fashion which they eventually settled for. He started putting it around for all he was worth that it had been purely in her imagination.”

  “I wouldn’t have credited him with enough imagination of his own.”

  “Well, as I told you, most of the credit should probably go to Paula, sending out her instructions from Johannesburg. I don’t doubt that Philip was on the line to her within hours of the murder being committed.”

  “Using our telephone too,” Robin pointed out, “which makes it so much more depressing.”

  “Well, at least one good thing came out of it,” I reminded him. “When it came to his turn, Philip had had enough experience to make a tidy job of it. After my talk with him the day before yesterday he made no mistake; just the right quantity of pills washed down with the right amount of gin.”

  “Yes, I am sure Robin will be grateful for that,” Toby agreed. “It will save those people he works for no end of trouble and taxpayers’ money.”

  “So there you have it!” I said, rushing in before my beloved could remind me that it was also our gin. “I think that’s the lot. Any questions?”

  “Just one,” he replied. “I had meant to ask it after you finished telling me all this last night, but I had become rather fatigued by then.”

  “Oh, really? I trust you have stood up to it better, Toby? What question?”

  “What was Paula aiming to get out of it? Apart from money, which she didn’t need? You can’t be suggesting that she had hopes of marrying Philip herself?”

  “Shouldn’t wonder. She probably started the affair as a way of getting her own back on the wicked stepmother, whom she’d detested ever since Dolly first snatched her father away and then drove him to suicide. And you’d be surprised by the number of women who found Philip attractive, even in his dotage. Besides, Paula’s probably just as snobby and pretentious as her stepmother and Philip’s reputation in South Africa is much higher than it ever was here; less competition, for one thing. Any further questions?”

  “Just one, I think, but it’s a tough one. How did they manage to communicate? You always told me that Dolly kept him under lock and key, even opened his letters.”

  “Ah, but he and Paula had no need to communicate by letter. They had a far more convenient arrangement. Paula kept a furnished flat in London. She used to buzz over three or four times a year.”

  “You amaze me!” Toby said. “And aren’t you sorry now, Robin, that you didn’t make the effort to get the answer last night? It would have been the very thing to revive you. Where was this flat, Tessa?”

  “In Upper St. Martin’s Lane, curiously enough. Just two minutes walk from the celebrated club which is frequented by so many of our distinguished writers and actors. At any rate, that’s what they tell their wives.”

  T H E E N D

  Felicity Shaw

  The detective novels of Anne Morice seem rather to reflect the actual life and background of the author, whose full married name was Felicity Anne Morice Worthington Shaw. Felicity was born in the county of Kent on February 18, 1916, one of four daughters of Harry Edward Worthington, a well-loved village doctor, and his pretty young wife, Muriel R
ose Morice. Seemingly this is an unexceptional provenance for an English mystery writer—yet in fact Felicity’s complicated ancestry was like something out of a classic English mystery, with several cases of children born on the wrong side of the blanket to prominent sires and their humbly born paramours. Her mother Muriel Rose was the natural daughter of dressmaker Rebecca Garnett Gould and Charles John Morice, a Harrow graduate and footballer who played in the 1872 England/Scotland match. Doffing his football kit after this triumph, Charles became a stockbroker like his father, his brothers and his nephew Percy John de Paravicini, son of Baron James Prior de Paravicini and Charles’ only surviving sister, Valentina Antoinette Sampayo Morice. (Of Scottish mercantile origin, the Morices had extensive Portuguese business connections.) Charles also found time, when not playing the fields of sport or commerce, to father a pair of out-of-wedlock children with a coachman’s daughter, Clementina Frances Turvey, whom he would later marry.

  Her mother having passed away when she was only four years old, Muriel Rose was raised by her half-sister Kitty, who had wed a commercial traveler, at the village of Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, near the city of Margate. There she met kindly local doctor Harry Worthington when he treated her during a local measles outbreak. The case of measles led to marriage between the physician and his patient, with the couple wedding in 1904, when Harry was thirty-six and Muriel Rose but twenty-two. Together Harry and Muriel Rose had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1906. However Muriel Rose’s three later daughters—Angela, Felicity and Yvonne—were fathered by another man, London playwright Frederick Leonard Lonsdale, the author of such popular stage works (many of them adapted as films) as On Approval and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney as well as being the most steady of Muriel Rose’s many lovers.