The End Of Solomon Grundy

by Julian Symons

  “What has this got to do with Mrs Gresham’s daughter, Mr Kronfelder?”

  “Doctor,” the big man said with his sweet smile. “I was a specialist in Stockholm – a doctor of the body before I understood that it is more important to cure the mind.”

  There was a knock on the door. A large, shapeless middle-aged woman came in. “The Group of Second Servers are ready for you to address them, Doctor.”

  “I shall be with them in five minutes. You know the rules, Irene, they will meditate together without speech. And when I go I wish you to take these gentlemen to Melicent. She is in her cell. You will see her quite alone,” he assured Manners, who nodded his head.

  “You must forgive me for trying to interest you in our work, but I have made more unlikely converts than police officers.” Again that smile. “You asked what our work had to do with Sylvia. Simply this. She came here with her mother and father when she was eight years old, and stayed until she was sixteen. At that time it was decided that she should leave.”

  “Who decided it and why?”

  “The decision was taken by Melly and her husband Charles.”

  “On your advice?”

  “They consulted me, certainly.”

  “And why was she – would expelled be the word?”

  “Indeed it would not.” Doctor Kronfelder put his arms on the desk, leaned forward and stared direct at Manners while managing somehow to include Sergeant Jones also in his gaze. “We accept everything that happens in the universe, but we are striving always towards the ideal of supra peace. We recognise high spirits, youthful unruliness, fornication, but we cannot permit them to disrupt the life of our community. Sylvia was a liar, a fornicator, one who had no conception of any Way beyond the Way of pleasure. We decided that for some years her life should be passed in the world outside this Home.”

  “We means you, isn’t that so, Doctor Kronfelder?”

  The doctor shook his head. “In myself I am nothing. I am the expression of the General Will.”

  Manners stood up. His voice was harsh. “I should like to see Mrs Gresham now.”

  Kronfelder rose behind his desk. Jones, rather belatedly, got up too. “I want you to understand the position. Sylvia’s life here was over long ago. It can have nothing to do with her sad death. I hope there may be no need for public reference to her life here.”

  He came out of the room with them and strode away along a passage. The shapeless Irene took them up two flights of stairs, answering almost monosyllabically their questions about the length of time she had been there and the sort of work she did. Her tongue seemed unlocked as they passed through a baize-covered door like that of a doctor’s waiting-room, into another part of the house. There were numbered doors on either side. An elderly man using a mop with a notable lack of enthusiasm smiled at them.

  “These are the meditation cells,” Irene said. “We use them when someone wants to come to an important decision, or after they have had a shock. Like Melly now.”

  Jones was walking beside her. “Did you know Estelle – Sylvia?”

  “I knew her.” She said fiercely, “She was corrupt.”

  “Corrupt?”

  “She wished to defile everything.” She opened the door of room number eleven, said, “Here are the policemen,” and was gone.

  The room was comfortable, shabbily but decently furnished, more like a bed-sitting-room than a cell for meditation. There were folkweave curtains and a bed with a cover in the same pattern. Melicent Gresham half-rose to greet them out of an arm-chair, then sank back into it. She was a fattish woman of fifty, with one of those good-looking, unlined, yet characterless faces frequently owned by those who have managed to absent themselves from the stresses of the world. She gestured with a plump ringless hand towards the other chair that the room contained. Manners took it. Jones sat down gingerly upon the bed.

  Melicent Gresham’s voice was high, fluting, without depth, the voice of somebody present corporeally but in spirit half-absent.

  “You’ll hardly believe me, Superintendent – Manners, isn’t it? – but I have had a presentiment that something was about to happen to Sylvia. I said so to Charles and to Percy, but they did not believe me. It shows what I have often said, that true immersion in the Way brings instinctive perception of the outer world.” Manners began to speak, but she interrupted him. “I should like to offer you some tea, but—” She let the sentence trail away. Jones, who was thirsty, wondered what the ultimate clause would have been.

  “Who is Percy?”

  “Doctor Kronfelder. Those who have known him a long time call him Percy.” She waved a hand limply. “We have been here fourteen years. We had been drifting through life, Charles and I, without purpose. Do you have a purpose in life?”

  “Catching criminals. Tell me how you came here,” Manners said hastily, as Mrs Gresham seemed about to reflect on his occupation.

  “Our time came when a surgeon, three surgeons, three of the leading surgeons in London, said that I must have an operation. I will not embarrass you with details, but it was a very delicate internal operation.” She looked at Manners and then at Jones, who found himself staring at the worn carpet. “At that time Charles had this job with, I don’t know, an export firm – oh, quite a good job, Superintendent. We lived in Highgate, a very pleasant house, everything quite comfortable, we were like any other people you meet in the street, you would have seen no difference. But there was a difference. I knew that I was not meant to be cut by surgeons, do you understand me? I was not aware of it at the time, but I was seeking for the Way.”

  The stuff I listen to in the cause of justice, Manners thought. Aloud he said, “Sylvia was with you?”

  “We took her to a meeting. Percy did not often hold public meetings even then, and now he has given them up, but something drew us to that one. He talked of the Way of Peace, and while I listened—” A little shiver ran through Mrs Gresham’s large frame. “—I cannot express my feelings. But I knew. I understood – oh, not intellectually, don’t think that, Charles is the clever one – but through all my senses I knew what Percy calls the Isness of Becoming. I asked Percy’s advice – he is also a doctor, you know that – and he told me that the operation was quite unnecessary. He treated me, not through medicine but through talk, prayer, meditation, and within two weeks the very distressing symptoms of my illness had vanished. We had found more than the Way of Peace, we had found Supra Peace.”

  “Your husband too?”

  “He Understands but he has not Become,” Mrs Gresham replied cryptically. “It is a saying of Percy’s.”

  The interview, Manners saw, was likely to be a long one. He persevered, trying to extract from Melicent Gresham’s tangled web of mysticism the thread that would lead to her daughter. The conversion, he gathered, had been complete. Charles Gresham had given up his job and they had come to live at the Home of Supra Peace. The principles of the Home were that all labour was voluntary and that those who volunteered received payment according to their needs. For those who lived in the Home, however, the needs were few. One of the great blessings of the Way of Supra Peace, as Melicent Gresham observed, was its absolute freedom from all monetary encumbrances, and Manners gathered that all such encumbrances in the form of house and savings had passed to the Home. Sylvia had gone to a local school, and had lived at the Home. Some twenty families lived there, the number fluctuating as new disciples were gathered and old ones strayed away.

  But there had always been something alien about Sylvia, her mother said. The Isness of Becoming was something that she never apprehended, and the simple life and food of the Home seemed insufficient for her. She began to show an interest in boys. There was one other boy of her age at the Home, and when she was fourteen she had been found at night in his bedroom – or so Manners gathered, for Mrs Gresham spoke of’ the incident so circuitously, and with such a number of tangential observations on Sylvia’s incapacity to understand the Way, that he could not be sure. After that there h
ad been an incident with a married man, a man who had left the Home abruptly. And after that Percy himself had been tempted, and – here Melicent Gresham used language of such mystical obscurity that Jones looked totally bewildered. But it had been decided that Sylvia should go.

  “Go where?”

  “Away.” She made one of her limp hand movements.

  “She belonged in the world of cinemas and theatres and – sex. The Way of Peace was not for her.”

  Jones felt that he should say something. “You sent her to a relative?”

  “We have no relatives.” She amplified this. “We do not acknowledge them.”

  “But then—”

  “She belonged in the world. We had taken her from it, but she wished to return. We did not prevent her. Percy found her a job.”

  “What sort of job?”

  “Something, I don’t know, it was in some kind of shop, a department store I believe. He also arranged for her to stay with a very suitable family, one that attended our meetings sometimes although they were not residents. But she did not stay more than a week or two with them, she did not stay in the job Percy had found.” She made another of those indecisive gestures. “She belonged to the world, she returned to it, it destroyed her.”

  Manners could hardly trust himself to speak. Indignation rose in his chest, strong as heartburn. “She was your daughter.”

  She bent her direct yet absent gaze upon him. “Here we regard earthly relationships differently.”

  “You owed her something.” She merely looked at him. “You did nothing – nothing at all to see whether she was happy, looked after?”

  “She had rejected us. She had rejected the Way of Peace. She had rejected this Home.”

  Home, Manners wanted to say, do you call this mausoleum for decaying cranks a home? But there was no point in saying it. “Did she ever come back?”

  “At first she came here sometimes to see us, three or four times a year perhaps. She said she was a model, then an actress, that she had good parts. Whether it was true or not—” She got up, wandered to the window, touching bits of furniture, “—I don’t know. It all seemed to us very trivial.”

  “Your husband shared your opinions?”

  “Of course.”

  “Had you seen her or heard from her in the last few months?”

  “Oh, certainly we had letters. And a card at Christmas. But I have not kept them. They would tell you nothing, they were – trivial.”

  Jones coughed, leaned forward on the bed. “Can you suggest anybody who might have had a reason for killing her?”

  She bent her gaze upon him, stared at him rather as though he were an insect. “It was one of her lovers,” she said placidly. “How was she when you found her, had she been – attacked?”

  “She was strangled,” Manners said shortly. “There was no sign of sexual interference.” They got up to go.

  The elderly man’s idle mopping had carried him to the head of the staircase where he stood, hand on mop head, staring at one of John Martin’s monumental religious scenes. “She told you what you wanted?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Did you know Sylvia Gresham?”

  He cackled. “I’m her father.”

  From the dismissive way in which Melicent Gresham had spoken, Manners had thought her husband was dead. Now he said, “You agreed when Sylvia left this place?”

  “Not much use doing anything else. When Melly makes up her mind to something, that’s what happens.”

  “But you were her father. You were responsible.”

  “I came here for peace. That’s what I’ve got.” He lifted the mop, touched the end of it, grinned.

  “Did you hear from her?”

  “Heard from her all right. Letters are trouble. Never answered.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Can’t remember. Some stuff. Always asking me about things.” He turned bleary eyes to Manners. “You’re as bad as she was, don’t seem to understand. I just want to be left alone, that’s all. Let them run everything, Percy, Melicent. Just leave me alone.” He looked at the painting, in which hundreds of tiny figures cowered under an enormous rock which was being split by lightning. Some vast heavenly presence filled the sky.

  “That’s a fine picture. I like looking at it.”

  Manners’s heels positively clattered as he went down the stairs, he went so fast across the hall and out to the car that Jones could hardly keep up with him. In the car, as they drove back, he spoke with a bitterness the sergeant had never heard in his voice. “The poor little devil, slung out to look after herself before she was sixteen. With a mother and father like that, what chance had she got? It would have been a blessing for her if she’d been brought up in a slum.”

  Chapter Three

  Some of the Witnesses

  When Manners returned to the Yard he found Ryan waiting for him. The inspector had the glint of achievement in his eye as he told of his conversations with Kabanga and Susan Strong. Manners was unimpressed, and said so.

  “That’s not the end of it. Kabanga lives in Surrey, in a place called The Dell, sort of a high-class housing estate, only they don’t call ’em that out there. She stayed there with him once or twice. Right? Now, a chap called—” Ryan looked at a memo pad, “—Paget has been on the blower to say that he remembers seeing this girl at a party there last Friday. She was with Kabanga, called herself Sylvia, he doesn’t know her other name—”

  “Sylvia Gresham. Estelle Simpson was her stage name or whatever you like to call it.”

  “Gresham, all right. At this party the girl had some sort of row with a man named Grundy. Paget says she smacked his face.”

  “Yes. I still don’t see any cause for excitement.”

  “Wait. We’re not at the end yet. You know Jones left someone checking up on that idea of his about the strip cartoon. Here’s the result.”

  Manners took the memorandum Ryan handed to him, read:

  Subject. Guffy McTuffie strip cartoon. This appears six days a week in Daily Blade, has done so for three years. Have talked to editor, Mr Clacton, who says it was recently decided to rest the series. Decision was communicated yesterday to T Werner and S Grundy, who are jointly responsible for it.

  T Werner and S Grundy are partners in AdArts, firm of advertising art agents, also produce Guffy cartoons. Understand Grundy has ideas, Werner is artist, but need to check. Suggest investigation both men, see if associates of Estelle Simpson.

  Manners read and re-read it. “Grundy was at the party.”

  “Right. And the girl smacked his face. And he lives in The Dell. A visit is called for, don’t you think? Here are two things that could have happened. One, Kabanga killed her because he found out she was having an affair with Grundy. His club is only ten minutes’ walk away from her flat, it’s perfectly possible. Two, and I like this better, she was a tom. Grundy is an old client and when she meets him she tries to put the black on him, that’s what causes the trouble at the party. She increases the pressure, threatens to tell his wife, he kills her.” Manners smiled faintly, said nothing. “I know, theorising without facts. Still, it’s worth seeing Grundy and this Paget, who sounds a nasty bit of work by the way.”

  “Yes, you’re right.” He was still thinking of Sylvia Gresham’s parents, and the Home of Supra Peace.

  “Whose manor is it?”

  “Bobby Clavering’s.”

  Five minutes later Manners was talking to Superintendent Robert Clavering, chief of the CID in the district where The Dell was to be found. The call was made partly as a matter of courtesy, partly in the hope of obtaining information. Clavering, a big bluff man who kept his nose to the ground, had little to give. The Dell, Manners gathered, was an estate similar to several that were being built on the outskirts of London and other big cities.

  “They knock down perfectly good old places, put up these damned glasshouses, people go and live in ’em because it’s fashionable, pay the earth for three poky rooms, all mod cons of
course, landscaped gardens, all that. The Dell’s one of those. Don’t know how some of the people afford to live there, I know I couldn’t. Wouldn’t want to for that matter, I like a garden of my own.”

  Manners was not interested in where Clavering lived or wanted to live. He asked about Paget and Grundy. “Edgar H Paget, F.A.L.P.A., yes, I know him.” Clavering’s jolly laugh boomed down the telephone. “Estate agent, does very nicely I should think. Biggest busybody in the district, always writing to the local paper about civic rights, ringing up the Council about refuse collection, that sort of man. What’s our Edgar been doing?”

  “Nothing he shouldn’t, as far as I know. He rang us with a bit of information about that job in Cridge Mews. Just wondered what his standing was.”

  “Solid citizen, very much so. What was the other chap’s name, Grundy? Don’t know him at all. You coming down here?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Come in and have a noggin.”

  Manners promised to do so, rang off, looked at his watch, and sighed. He ate a hurried meal, collected the sergeant who had been gathering the material in the memo, a man with the improbable name of Fastness, made sure that Paget was in, and set out on the half-hour car journey to see him and perhaps to pay a call also on Grundy.

  “Mind you, Superintendent, I’m saying nothing, I’m making no accusation. Just giving you the evidence of my own eyes.” Edgar Paget flung himself back in his chair, a man exhausted by the performance of his duty.