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

by Roger Ormerod

  “Clarice has asked me to have a word with you,” said Anthony calmly. “As you’ve achieved nothing, and as the police now have things in hand, she thinks you should leave.”

  David considered him with interest. “She says that?”

  “Her exact words.”

  “Though paraphrased, perhaps. But we can’t leave. The police would object.”

  “Nonsense. You weren’t even here when he died.”

  “But Elsa was.”

  I drew in a quick breath. “But you can’t—”

  “No. But the police do. You’re a suspect, Elsa. And here’s the man to tell you.”

  The young man who stolled in might have been an executive, on the financial side perhaps, of an international combine. He was tall and slim, and had a diffident air, and his eyes were the purest, brightest brown I had ever seen.

  “This is Detective Chief Inspector Abel,” David said in introduction.

  Then I realized that Abel was not as young as he seemed; it was simply that the harrowing nature of his employment had slid past him, leaving no mark, his skin being tough enough to deflect it. When he spoke it was with grave humor – intended as such – but his eyes did not light with it.

  “Indeed, she has been. A central suspect. But I hadn’t seen her, of course.” He gave a formal, mocking bow. “I’m looking forward to taking your statement, Mrs Mallin, and yes…” turning to Anthony, his voice cooling. “…yes, I forbid her to leave.”

  “My stepmother is quite distressed.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. She would be, of course. But Mrs Mallin remains.”

  Then Fisher, oblivious to anything other than his own central obsession, burst into the room and made straight for David and George, apparently not even seeing Abel.

  “They say he was shot. They say that. But he’d been bounced around in the sea for nearly a week. And you’ve seen those rocks! The body’d be in a hell of a mess, so how’d they know he was shot? A bit of a hole in him…”

  “Shut your stupid mouth,” George advised him quietly.

  And David politely answered his question. “They’d find the bullet in him.”

  “The Police Surgeon is positive,” drawled Abel, but he was sharp with interest.

  “Tcha! Surgeons! What the hell—”

  “Who’s this?” asked Abel.

  “His name’s Martin Fisher. He’s a claims assessor for Konrad Klein’s insurance company. Naturally, he’s interested in the outcome.”

  “I’m sure he is. Now, sir, I’m the police officer in charge of this investigation. If you’ve got any information relevant to my inquiries, I’ll be glad to have it.”

  “You bet I have.” Fisher eyed Abel with contempt, clearly underestimating him. “These two, here, they’ve done nothing but obscure the picture…”

  “I’ll hear it in private,” said Abel firmly.

  Fisher stiffened his shoulders, then turned to the door. George got to his feet. “Fisher!”

  They stopped, Fisher and Abel.

  “Don’t be a damn fool, Martin,” said George, with less bite. “Think what you’re doing. Your measly percentage isn’t important now.”

  “What percentage? That’s all you can talk about.” “You make it too damned obvious, man. Shut up before you go too far.”

  “I protest—”

  “Look,” said George. “Go and cool off. The Chief Inspector doesn’t want to know.”

  “Oh, but I do.” Abel smiled. His lips moved and his ears moved; there was no more to it than that.

  George glanced at David, who shrugged. So George went ahead. “Probably he gets so much per cent of any claim he squashes. That’d be £200,000 for an accident involving Konrad’s cabinet, half that for any other death but suicide, and nothing for suicide. Already he’s knocked it down from £200,000 to £100,000. Now he’s aiming for the jackpot – nothing. What he doesn’t realize is…”

  “I get bloody nothing. There’s been no claim.”

  “Ha!” said George with massive contempt. “What he’s forgetting is that there’s a murder here, and it’s going to occur to somebody that his personal status as a suspect might become more important than his financial one.”

  George took a deep breath and paused. He was proud of that, and glanced at David for approval. David pursed his lips and nodded, but he wasn’t happy.

  “You’ll pay for this!” cried Fisher. “It’s slander.”

  “Unless,” said Abel smoothly, “there’s a basis of truth to it.”

  It was an invitation for George to stick his neck out. George, who’s good at that, did so.

  “It’s a thought – a theory. Try it for size, huh? There’s this idiot, here, who happens to be at this place to arrange the new insurance cover on Konrad’s latest illusion. He’d have to be let into a few secrets, now wouldn’t he, and he wouldn’t be happy about the bit where a gun is fired and splinters fly out of the cabinet. But we hear he’d already signed the policy. Maybe he was having second thoughts. I tell you I would. So what’s more natural than that he’d go up there and argue it out with the great illusionist himself?”

  I’d expected a protest, but Fisher was silent. Then I saw that Abel’s fingers were deep in the flesh of his arm. Abel nodded.

  George said: “He knew Amaryllis was up there, so there was something going to happen. Suppose that the genius here saw her coming down from the Tower. Suppose she was showing how shaken she was by it all. Suppose he went up to see Konrad, and Konrad laughed at his fears, and said he had so much confidence in his cabinet that he would go inside, and Fisher could fire the gun…”

  “This is preposterous,” Fisher bleated, and Abel said: “Go on.”

  “And supposing Martin agreed. And we know that it’d been failing the last few times. And suppose it failed again, and Martin drilled one neat hole in the cabinet and another in Konrad. Then where’d he be? Just imagine it. Landed with a man he’d just killed, and on top of that he’d recently signed a policy that’d pay the widow £200,000.”

  And Anthony, imagining it as requested, threw back his head and laughed heartily. Fisher turned his eyes up in outraged protest to Abel. “Are you going to listen to this?”

  “I’d like to hear what happened next.”

  “Well… he’d have to do two things – cover himself personally, and squash the insurance claim. He’d accomplish the second by pushing the cabinet against the door and throwing Konrad out of the window, thus making it look like suicide. Unfortunately for him, we read the set-up as showing that Konrad had had an accident, so that Martin had to work like mad to disprove that. But now, if he goes on shouting his head off, somebody’s going to think that he’s trying to prove suicide for some reason that isn’t insurance – and that’d be because he killed Konrad himself.”

  Anthony wasn’t laughing any more. It was with genuine interest that he put the question, a split second before I could do so myself.

  “Then how did he get out of the room?”

  Abel was smiling. Get round that one! He waited.

  “I can show you that too,” said George.

  “Now that,” said Abel, “I should like to see.”

  “Right!”

  “Now,” said Abel.

  “At your service.”

  “I’m going to play some music,” said Anthony, and he walked out.

  It was a funny thing, but on the way up the staircase – and I was the trailing end of the cortege – I didn’t hear any music begin from the lounge.

  I found that I was completely uninterested in watching any more demonstrations, and now, more than before, the thought of that room was depressing. I hung back, deciding to go along to our room and get my coat…

  David said: “Aren’t you coming, Elsa?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “And miss George making an idiot of himself?”

  I smiled at him, weakly, I’m sure, and followed.

  There was no talk of a tilted cabinet this time, be
cause there was no longer any suggestion that it had toppled with Konrad inside. But nevertheless, George seized it and laid it on its back on the floor, its door upwards.

  “Right,” he said. “You get it like this, and you shove it up against the door with its castors pushing against it.”

  This door, by the way, was a great solid three-inch slab of oak, with wrought-iron hinges. The cabinet lay against it in the way it must have been when we ran up to the room.

  “So … you pick it up,” said George, seizing the end that rested against the door and lifting it. This cabinet, mind you, weighed around two hundred pounds, and he was lifting half of it, higher and higher, until it was above the top edge of the door. He turned, quite undistressed.

  “Then you open the door under it.”

  He reached down with his left hand, turned the catch up, and opened it, the end of the cabinet meanwhile supported on one hand.

  “And you rest the edge of the cabinet on the top of the door.”

  He did so. The door was open about fifteen inches. George slapped his palms together. “Who’s going to slip through?”

  Not me! But Abel was of course the main witness, Fisher could not have been expected to prove something against his own interests, and David looked at me blandly. Me it was.

  I slipped through the gap gingerly, and George said: “Now grab the latch, Elsa, and slam the door.”

  I did. It was at first stiff, then swung free, then, when the falling cabinet caught it, it slammed back at me fiercely. The crash from inside was appalling, and in the sudden silence, I realized I was alone on those shadowed and frightening stairs, with what could be anything just out of sight around the curves in either direction. I hammered on the door, I shouted. I think I panicked a little. And then there was the blessed drag of the cabinet across the floor and I was able to burst inside with the impetus necessary to project myself into David’s arms, to realize that the surprise on his face was not at my entrance but at Fisher, who had thrown himself at George in a fury.

  It must have been an insane one, because he had just witnessed a display of George’s strength. They were easily separated. Abel was affable, even amused.

  “Well,” he said, “a bit of light relief never hurt anybody. But I wonder who else round here – in the county even – could do what you’ve just done with that cabinet. Oh, come on, it’s quite impracticable. Besides, just look at that door. You’ve put castor marks all down the bottom half, and there weren’t any before.”

  Fisher was more calm, but the bounce had gone out of him. “He’s always chucking around his blasted theories.”

  “Yes.” Abel smoothed his hair, long, silky, blond. “But I already knew that Konrad Klein wasn’t shot inside the cabinet.”

  David reacted. “Then why did you…”

  “I’m very receptive to ideas, if only to eliminate them. But, you see, there was no blood in the cabinet. And nobody could clean away enough to deceive our pathologist. Also, you see, there was no bullet found inside it, and it’s unlikely a murderer would think it of such significance that he’d search for it and take it away.”

  “Bullet?” said David, all attention. “Why should there have been a bullet if it was in his body?”

  “Oh, did I say that? Surely not. There was a clear shot right through the chest. Front to back – missed the bone everywhere. And just think, if he had been shot inside the cabinet, it must have been so spent after going through his body that it failed to go through the opposite panel, or even make a mark on it.”

  He smiled complacently and patted Fisher affably on the shoulder. “So you see, you didn’t have to get all worked up.”

  I could see that this casually offered information meant a great deal to David. His eyes met mine, and his were completely out of focus. It was as though he groped for my support in something, but I could only grasp his arm. His muscles were tense.

  But somehow I sensed what he was thinking; that his original theory was basically correct, and the set-up was a cover for Konrad’s faked death by accident – but something different had occurred, though not what George had propounded. And because of its apparent impossibility, I felt the skin prickle down my spine, and David glanced at me when I shuddered.

  Then the door opened slowly, and we all turned to look at it. Clarice entered, Amaryllis at her shoulder. They were both looking very frightened. “We heard the bang.”

  “Ah!” Abel almost opened his arms to them. “You came at a very appropriate time.”

  I couldn’t see what was appropriate about it.

  “If you would sit down,” he suggested to Clarice. Chairs? I’d seen no chairs. But there was one, an upright. Clarice almost collapsed into it, with that action transforming the scene into something like an inquisition, she being the only one seated.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Abel began quietly enough, “about the idea that David Mallin put forward. You remember: that your husband faked an accident with this cabinet in order to defraud the insurance company?”

  But David had not said that; but he didn’t object. “Yes,” Clarice whispered.

  “But you’ve disputed that?”

  “Of course.”

  “No. You disputed the fact that you knew about it.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “But you admit it was what he intended?”

  She untwined her fingers, twined them again. “It must have been.”

  “There’s no must about it. Do you believe he did?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he’d given you no hint?”

  “No.”

  “What about his claim that he was worth more dead than alive?”

  “That was a joke. A lot of men say that.”

  “I don’t.”

  “But I bet you are,” she flashed at him.

  He smiled coldly. “I’ll have to work it out. So… having had no hint… his sudden disappearance must have been a shock to you.”

  “What do you think!”

  “Was it not?”

  “Of course it was.”

  “Particularly as he could not have left this room alive, the window being the only way out?”

  “Yes.”

  “But tell me – and this has been confirmed over and over – why were you so much more distressed to hear that his body had been found?”

  “It was… more real. There’d been a chance…”

  “Nonsense. You invited two inquiry agents here, not to prove he was still alive, or even to discover how he’d died, but to prove the necessary facts for your insurance claim.”

  “That’s not true. I wanted advice.”

  “But they did, and you were pleased.”

  “Relieved.”

  “Until his body turned up.”

  “The shock…”

  “When you’d believed him dead already?” his voice was like ice; I hoped he would never speak to me like that. “No, don’t look away. You were shocked because you really believed him to be alive, in spite of all the evidence. And you could not have believed that unless you’d worked it with him.”

  “No!”

  “You deliberately left this room empty for him to get free.”

  “Oh… really!”

  “You’d join him later and enjoy…”

  “No, oh no!”

  “Yes, oh yes,” he blazed at her.

  “He’s dead!” she screamed. “Isn’t that enough for you?”

  “No. Not enough. The truth, Mrs Klein. We’re talking, now, about complicity to defraud.”

  She sobbed. Amaryllis touched her shoulder in sympathy. Clarice raised her face, fierce red patches on her cheeks. Yet, I thought her eyes were calm, even calculating. But she had nothing to lose, now, nothing. Konrad had been murdered, and nothing was going to alter it.

  “He… he worked it all out. I didn’t approve. But we… we were finding it difficult to carry on. I was going to join him, later, when he let me know – with the money. Oh… oh, it was clever.” Sh
e sobbed in bitter amusement at Konrad’s cleverness. “But he didn’t tell me what he intended… just to… to rush up when I heard the crash…” She glanced up at Amaryllis. “As we heard it a few minutes ago. Oh, dear Lord, but I didn’t know, and all I did was what he said.”

  There was a passionate innocence in her voice, but I could not meet her eyes.

  “Which you did to the letter?”

  “Exactly what he said. Yes, I did that.”

  “Knowing he had arranged some means of getting from this room and hiding low somewhere?”

  “Believing that.”

  “I said: knowing. Did he say he was going to do that?”

  Her voice became slurred with pain. “He said so. Obviously, he didn’t.”

  “Why obviously?”

  “Because he was killed first.”

  “Before he had a chance of getting to his hideaway, you mean? But didn’t you check?”

  “How could I? I didn’t know where.”

  “But surely there’d be somewhere, a flat, a cottage… something like that, which you both knew.”

  “Not that I knew.”

  “Are you telling me he had some private place which was his own secret?”

  “It’s what I’d assumed.”

  “Already assumed, you mean, before he told you his plans?”

  “Well, no.” She tossed her head, her hair flying. “Well, yes, damn you, I thought he’d got a woman somewhere.”

  “Hmm.” Abel looked away from her, then back. “A woman, then, with whom he might have intended to leave, after using you to help with the deception…”

  Her voice cracked. “How could that be, you damn fool, when I’d be the one with the money!”

  “Well, yes. How clever of you to have realized that.”

  “And, obviously, he didn’t get to her.” She rustled her shoulders in triumph.

  “How do you know that?”

  Because we all knew who that secret lover was – Amaryllis. And she was there, with us, with no secret flat…