More Dead Than Alive (David Mallin Detective series Book 15)

by Roger Ormerod

  More Dead Than Alive

  Roger Ormerod

  © Roger Ormerod 1980

  Roger Ormerod has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1980 by Robert Hale Ltd.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  One

  I always worry when David is late. He’d said he would come straight away, which, in that Porsche of his, would have meant three hours for the 160 miles, even cross-country. But he was late.

  Eventually, I found myself on the battlements, my back to the racing sea-wind, looking out over the wide and falling valley, over the woodland to the grey horizon, watching the ribbon of winding road which appeared in loops between the trees. And when I finally saw the lone car, it was not the Porsche, but George’s.

  I was not certain whether I was pleased. I have a deep affection for David’s partner, George, but Clarice had asked simply for advice, and now, with the full manpower of their detective agency on the way, it made the whole thing something more like a case.

  I was relieved to be able to turn away, although my return journey meant facing the wind and walking towards the High Tower, with all its menace, and closer to the sullen roar and surge of the sea against the cliffs. During the early days of my visit, I had been pleasantly awed by the grandeur; now it filled me with dread. I hurried to the small door in the lea of the tower, and shut it away from me. The walls were three feet of solid stone, but although I could no longer hear it I believed that I could still feel the throb of the sea.

  The steep stone staircase led down to another door on to the Long Gallery. I walked down the Grand Staircase and into the Great Hall. Everywhere in Kilvennan Castle bore capitals and an adjective. I found Clarice in the Cleric’s library.

  “They’re coming,” I said.

  “They?”

  I had not noticed Anthony, sitting almost hidden in a high-backed easy chair across the fire from his stepmother. I did not know that Clarice had told him of her request to me – nearer a plea perhaps. “My husband and his partner,” I told him.

  He grimaced. Anthony had a long, mobile face, on which, a grimace could explore all the emotions from distaste to cynical amusement. I felt no attachment for Anthony. He was a year or two younger than me – put him at twenty-six – but his self-assurance was of a much more mature man. He carried his six feet lithely, and I have no doubt looked very sleek in his stage costume of white tie and tails. But I did not trust his hands.

  Clarice was looking distressed. Perhaps she had been arguing, yet again, with Anthony. I hoped it was not my announcement that had upset her.

  “You’ll like George Coe,” I assured her. “Between them, they’ll sort it out.”

  “Hah!” said Anthony in disgust. “What’s the matter with the police? Why can’t we wait for the inquest verdict?”

  “Oh… really!” Clarice was annoyed, though it was obvious he was deliberately baiting her. She flashed me a brief appeal with those wide, grey eyes of hers. I didn’t know what she expected. I was not even sure what her obvious lack of mourning was intended to mean; perhaps a deliberate affront to Anthony. And yet, she had surely loved her husband, and I was sure Anthony had hated him.

  “There must be a few details to clarify,” I said gently. “David could well produce evidence for the inquest.”

  He played with a coin, riffling it along the knuckles of his right hand until it vanished, to appear and perform again along his left. He glanced up at me.

  “We ll see, Elsa, we’ll see.”

  I was relieved to hear the car drawing up outside. The side window of this room looked out on the wide, gravel sweep of the drive below the stepped terrace. I went across and saw George climb out, look round him appraisingly, and say something to David as they stood together. David looked solemn, perhaps a little disturbed by the castle, as I had been at first. It really was rather overpowering. I went out into the Hall to let them in.

  Having considered the question, I had come to the conclusion that it had been quite reasonable for a man like Konrad Klein to buy such a property. It was broken down, had ancient plumbing and facilities, was cold and draughty and inconvenient, but its massive flamboyance had exactly matched his personality. It had a dour and mysterious aura about it, especially in moonlight when the bats sailed over the battlements and the barn owls cried in the night. This had been the natural habitat for such a man.

  But the residual finances had not run to more help than a cook-housekeeper and a chauffeur-gardener, so that I had to open the huge doors myself, and say: “David, you’re late.”

  Then Clarice was at my shoulder, making the correct social noises, and George was hugging me and banging his cheek on mine, as though I hadn’t seen him only a month before.

  “Elsa, you look marvellous. Doesn’t she, Dave?”

  “Always,” said David loyally, kissing me gently, absent-mindedly. He turned to Clarice, taking her hand, smiling. “I hear you have a problem, Mrs Klein.”

  “Clarice,” she murmured. “Elsa and I were friends at school, so we must be friends too.” She eyed George doubtfully – he’s so big and generally untidy. “And… George, is it? …George, too.”

  David and George agreed readily enough, each apparently anxious to complete the formalities and get me alone. She appeared to realize this. “Elsa will show you your room, David, of course. But you, George, I must admit you’ve caught me on the wrong foot. I’ll have to put you next to Elsa and David, but the bed isn’t made up. Perhaps you’d care to…”

  She made a vague gesture towards the Library, but Anthony was lounging in the doorway, cynical eyebrows raised, waiting for an introduction, and, I thought, poised to turn away if it was offered.

  “We’ll just go up to our room,” I suggested, to her obvious relief.

  I led the way up the Grand Staircase, with George carrying all their baggage and David absent-mindedly filling his pipe. “Looks like a set for a Dracula film,” said David, and George added: “Wouldn’t like to pay the rates.”

  They did not know, at that time, that most of the rooms were empty and musty, and parts of the structure collapsing. The electricity system depended on a diesel-powered dynamo somewhere across the courtyard, and was ancient. Dracula would have demanded more comfort.

  “In here,” I said.

  All the doors were deep-set, heavy oak, with latches but no locks. The room itself was high and deep, the windows looking out over the courtyard, narrow and tall windows, uncurtained. The furnishings were adze-chipped from black oak, from the quaint stool in front of my hand-carved dressing-table to the immense wardrobe. The bed would have slept all three of us. It did not even creak when George flopped his great weight on it.

  “Now,” said David, leaning back against the door, “what is all this, Elsa?”

  “I did tell you on the phone, David. Konrad is dead – he must be – and the suggestion is that it was suicide.”

  “Whose suggestion?” asked George.

  “The police. This happened a week ago. And naturally, losing her husband, and the police… Clarice is distressed.”

  “That
he’s dead?” David asked. “Or that it was suicide?”

  And George said: “She didn’t seem upset to me.”

  Looking back to our schooldays, our period at finishing school in Switzerland when Clarice had been head prefect, I must admit that she had never seemed distressed. Clarice, come to think of it, would never allow herself to be unduly disturbed by outside influences; she influenced them.

  “She doesn’t show her feelings. But I know she’s upset. It was so… dreadful, you see. Konrad was in his workroom – he called it his laboratory – up in the Tower. It overlooks the sea and the cliffs – I’ll show you later – and he was working on one of his cabinets. From here – from this room – because I had the window open, and I suppose because he had his open, I heard the shot…”

  “Shot?” said George with interest. But David made a slight gesture, and George was silent.

  “There were always shots,” I told them. “It was part of what he was doing with that cabinet of his. So I didn’t take much notice of just a shot, but then there was this loud crash. I suppose it echoed right down the Tower, because even Clarice heard it, and she was in the Pink Lounge. And the crash wasn’t usual. So I ran out, and Clarice was hurrying up the stairs to the gallery, so we went into the Tower together. It’s right near the top – oh, there’s hundreds of stairs. When we got to the door we were quite breathless. Anyway, she banged on the door. It’s like this one, thick and heavy. You don’t get much of a sound, but of course it wasn’t locked and she turned the latch but the door wouldn’t budge. Not an inch. We both pushed at it, but there’s not much room for two to stand, and we couldn’t move it. And there was no sound from inside. I tell you, I was getting quite scared. Clarice said, ‘Rush down and get somebody – one of the men,’ so I started down those wretched steps, and met Anthony coming up. You saw him, hanging around in that doorway like a disapproving cloud.”

  They nodded solemnly, though I thought George was suppressing a smile. I hurried on.

  “You can be sure Anthony was taking his time. For his father he wasn’t going to put himself out. I turned back up those stairs again and he followed me, not a bit out of breath, and when we got to the door he just said give him room, all lazily confident you know, and he had a go at it himself, got his shoulder right down to it, turned the latch up, and put all his strength behind it. And it opened slowly – you could hear the dragging sound – but in the end he had it open enough to get in. The cabinet had been lying on its back against the door, and he’d had to slide it away.”

  “And this Konrad had shot himself,” said George.

  “Oh, no. Not at all. He just wasn’t there, and the window, right opposite the door, that was wide open, so that… well, he couldn’t have gone anywhere else, and when you see it – the fall to the rocks… oh, David, he must be dead.”

  “Doubtless,” said David negligently, but he had that look in his eyes, that inward peering awareness, which indicated he was keenly interested. “So why send for us, Elsa?”

  I glanced at George, not wishing to remind them that I’d sent for David alone. “It’s kind of… well, Clarice was saying, it was one of Konrad’s little, cold jokes, that he’d be worth more dead than alive…”

  David said smoothly: “And is he?”

  “You won’t believe the insurance he took out, David. But of course it was partly professional advertisement, and all of it would be non-payable if he committed suicide. So you see…”

  I looked from one to the other. They did not fully appreciate the situation. Their faces were blank and unresponsive.

  “But surely you’ve realized! Konrad Klein was the greatest escapologist since Houdini, and one of the world’s leading illusionists. His stage name was Konrad Klimax.”

  Obsessed with the letter K, he had been. I supposed that even the K of Kilvennan had attracted him. Given time, he’d have been spelling his home as Kastle. It was his talisman, K, as in kunning and kold. I hadn’t liked him, but Clarice was my friend.

  “Clarice is my friend!” I said angrily when they looked uneasy and glanced at each other. “David, she can’t accept that he committed suicide.”

  “Of course she would not.”

  “You don’t have to sound so bitter, David.”

  “Ask yourself. Are you expecting us to prove it wasn’t suicide, for the sake of… how many thousands! Elsa?”

  “Oh, you’re being so stupid. Both of you. Would such a man, even if he intended to take his own life, do it in such a way that it was obvious? When he’d boasted about being worth so much dead! No, of course he wouldn’t. He’d at least create an illusion that it wasn’t suicide. It was his career, David. Do you imagine he couldn’t create one grand, final illusion, if only to disguise his suicide as… something else?”

  “Easy, love, easy,” said David. “There’s something in what you say. But obviously he didn’t, because that’s what it looks like.”

  I can’t always be patient with him. “Then don’t you think you ought to find out why?”

  George levered himself to his feet and stretched. “Perhaps he wasn’t given any choice.”

  “Oh, come on, George.” David sounded irritable. “With that cabinet against the door?”

  “Well, let’s go and see this wonderful room.”

  “Later,” said David. “Do we get to eat, Elsa?”

  “Dinner’s in… ten minutes. Time for a wash and a clean shirt. We’ll go up afterwards.”

  George was at the door, invigorated by the mention of food. David seemed to catch him with his tone. “It’s not what we usually do, helping a widow fiddle the insurance company.”

  “It’s not like that!”

  “Isn’t it, Elsa? Perhaps that’s what we ought to clear up first.”

  “After we eat,” said George.

  “You’ll see,” I assured them, “while we eat. You’ll meet them all.”

  Two

  They used a corner of the old ballroom as a dining recess, the real dining-room having deposited its ceiling on the floor. We went down together. David and I were informal, he in slacks and that splendid cashmere cardigan Doris bought him for Christmas. George had put on his other suit, the one with the narrow lapels and the waistcoat, and looked massively complacent.

  Clarice was already there, fussing with the table settings as though her arrangements could be anything but perfect, and to my surprise, because she always seems to be last in everything, Amaryllis Moore was standing against the carved stone mantel, smoking a cigarette. But of course, she was always eager to see a fresh male face; twice as eager for two.

  I introduced them. George beamed, much taken, and David was gravely attentive, which told me how attractive he found her.

  “Amaryllis?” he asked. “Very unusual.”

  “It’s Amanda, really. But for the stage Amaryllis is more catching.”

  David glanced at me, raising his eyebrows. And to think I hadn’t told him!

  She was considering him seriously with those huge, brown eyes of hers, which gained so much from her fine-boned face with the high cheekbones, and her pert little pixie mouth. She poised the combined result on a long neck from what I’d have called bony shoulders. But then, she’d had no end of poising practice. Her whole body spoke of it, her lithe collectedness and her long, slim and supple limbs.

  “Amaryllis was a ballet dancer,” I explained, before David had explored all the possibilities.

  “But not recently,” she told him, in case he expected her to go up on to her points. “For the last five years I’ve worked with Konrad.”

  “His assistant,” I said.

  She flashed me a look of distaste. “Partner,” she purred. “His partner. He said I had the right body for it.”

  George said: “The table’s laid for eight,” and when she tried the same look on him he beamed at her. “The right body for sawing in half?” he asked.

  “Konrad’s illusions were a little more advanced than that.” She was very cool with him.
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  I had not noticed Anthony, quietly walking the full length of the ballroom. One doesn’t; he simply appears. Now, hearing the last remark, he interrupted with restrained savagery, his voice smooth and low-pitched.

  “My father was on the way out before he met you, my dear. Who wants full-stage illusions these days? He couldn’t get near a theater stage in the past two years, and illusions are dead on television because you always half believe it’s a trick of the camera. But we’re all happy to have you with us, of course. Aren’t we, Clarice?” He paused. Clarice had turned, frowning, obviously unsure, as I was, whether he was denigrating his father or Amaryllis. She made no reply, knowing it was simply a dramatic pause. Anthony swept a hand in grave acknowledgement. “Amaryllis, darling, you at least kept him sane, right to the end.”

  If he was deliberately trying to disturb her poise, he was far from succeeding. It was too professional. “Dear Anthony,” she murmured, and Clarice was looking rapidly from David to George, assessing the damage this might have wrought in their opinions.

  But George was bland, and David simply turned to me, took my arm and said softly: “Did you notice the Copley? I’m sure its genuine.”

  “Nothing,” claimed Anthony in facetious triumph, “in this damned place is genuine, except the bloody stone walls.”

  “Eight places,” said George again, impatient to get at the food. “Who’re we waiting for?”

  They came in together, Martin Fisher and Auden Sundry, almost arm in arm. I’d rarely seen them apart, but they were old friends, as Fisher’s company handled all the insurance cover for the Magic Circle, and Sundry was their President.

  “Let me introduce you,” I said, and when I had done so we moved to our places.

  I was not deceived by George’s immediate absorption with the food, which was served by Clarice’s cook-housekeeper. George always has an ear cocked. I spoke occasionally to Martin Fisher, on my left, because he’s the bouncy sort who will not allow you to remain uninvolved, but my attention was mainly for David, who was demanding facts, facts, facts…