“You’ve read his books, I suppose?”
“Several. They’re very high-brow, and all that.”
“Did you like them?”
“Ye—es,” she replied with the air of one who must not admit dislike of a book without a story and music without a tune. Then suddenly she smiled straight into his eyes and said, “No. I only read bits of them. You see, I never had a good education.”
“Neither did I,” Bony told her with charming assurance. “Please go on. What did you think of Mrs Blake and Mr Wilcannia-Smythe and the others?”
“Yes, do tell, Ethel,” urged the supporting Mrs Farn. “That Miss Chesterfield now. She was there, wasn’t she, the night Mervyn Blake died?”
A shadow passed across the green eyes.
“She isn’t so extra specially friendly with Mrs Blake as she made out to the police,” Ethel said in dramatically lowered tones. “In their different ways they were a funny lot. They had only one thing in common.”
“What was that?” pressed Mrs Farn.
“A good opinion of themselves. The worst of the lot was Mr Wilcannia-Smythe. I hope, Mr Bonaparte, that you don’t get as conceited as he is after you’ve had a few novels published.”
“If he does, we’ll have to take the conceit out of him,” threatened Mrs Farn, and Red-head laughed at Bony who was pretending, successfully, to be self-conscious.
He said, “I hope that no amount of success will make me conceited. How did you get along with Mrs Blake?”
“Mrs Blake is very nice and very kind to everyone. She puts herself out no end. When I first went there, she took me to my room, and asked me if it was to my liking, and said I was to say so about anything that wasn’t. There was no key to the door, and so I asked for one, telling her that men had been known to walk in their sleep after telling me what lovely hair I had, and the rest. She found a key all right. Then, after dinner, when they had several guests, she’d come out to the kitchen and help cook and me to clean up.”
“That was considerate of her,” Bony murmured. “She writes, too, doesn’t she?”
“A lot,” replied Red-head. Her eyes became wistful, and she clasped her hands before continuing, “Mrs Blake’s got a peach of a writing-room. Primrose walls and a primrose carpet. There’s a big walnut writing desk with silver ornaments, and a tall ebony statuette of Venus and—and a man riding a great horse with wings. Oh, I wish I had a room like that. Nothing frilly, you know. And all one wall covered with pictures of her friends. They are all there except—except her husband. But then—” and the girl laughed, softly—“I wouldn’t want to have a husband like that in my room.”
“Marry an author and have such a room,” advised Bony. “I’d ask you to marry me—if I could, Miss Lacy. I suppose Mervyn Blake’s room was almost as luxurious?”
“No, it wasn’t,” she said. “He had his room built in the garden. It’s just plainly furnished with a bed couch, an arm chair, a felt carpet, and a writing desk. There’s hundreds of books in cases and a big typewriter on its special table. In a cupboard he kept brandy and dry ginger and a glass. A great man for his drink. He even had a cupboard in the garage.”
“In the garage!” exclaimed Bony.
“In the garage,” she repeated. “I never knew a man like him. The more he drank the plainer he spoke and the steadier he walked.”
“Did he keep drink in the garage as well as in his writing-room?” persisted Bony, and the green eyes smouldered. She spoke slowly to emphasize the truth of her words.
“I saw him at the cupboard in the garage that night he brought Miss Chesterfield from the city. I had a headache and took a couple of aspirins, and cook advised me to get out in the cool of the evening for a little while before dinner was served. It happened I was at the side of the house when I saw him drive the car into the garage. He went to the cupboard in the far corner, and he took out a glass and a bottle, and he poured himself a drink and dashed it down. A sneaker, I called it. And then he hurried outside and shut and locked the doors.
“And Mrs Montrose waiting on him hand and foot,” Ethel went on. “Came into the kitchen herself for his jug of milk and glass, and took them to his writing-room, saying he’d have had a tiring afternoon in the city and the milk would steady his poor stomach. A slinky, scheming woman, that. Making eyes at him all the time and Mrs Blake laughing up her sleeve at her. Not that he took any notice of the Montrose woman. Not a bit. I reckon he had used her up long ago.”
“He always drank milk before dinner, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Cook said it was to settle the booze in him he’d had in the afternoon so’s he could begin again sober in the evening.”
“Mrs Montrose is a well-known writer, too, isn’t she?”
“Oh yes, written a lot of books, I think. She was telling the Pommy writer about them for hours, and he was putting it all into a large note-book. Insulting, filthy beast.”
“Mrs Montrose, or the—”
“The Pommy writer. Man by the name of Marshall Ellis,” Red-head said aggressively. “Thought it was clever to be rude. Food stains on all his waistcoats. Little piggy eyes, and picked his teeth after eating. But his voice! Oh, his voice, when you weren’t looking at him! If they pushed a voice like his into a fillum star, there’d be a screaming riot with all the bobby socksers in the world.”
“A peculiar man, Miss Lacy. Please go on. What of the others?”
“The others? Oh! Well, there was Twyford Arundal. He was lovely. Give him two gins and squash and he’d recite poetry. Give him four and he’d compose it, and Ella Montrose would take it down. They had to be careful with him after the sixth, because when he’d had about six, he’d still go on composing poetry but nothing would come out of his mouth.
“Then there was Martin Lubers. He’s in the wireless, you know. More than once he’d say something that would rile them, but they crawfished to him no end. I was telling cook about it one day and she said it was because he had a high job in the wireless, and got them all a lot of publicity. It’s all wheels within wheels, she said, and I think there’s a deal of truth in that.”
“H’m! Well, that’s all most interesting,” Bony said. “Er, they often had people from overseas staying with them, Mrs Farn tells me. Were you there this time last year when Dr Dario Chaparral was visiting the Blakes?”
“Yes, I was. There was the same crowd almost. Wilcannia-Smythe, Ella Montrose, Twyford Arundal, and Martin Lubers, and Miss Chesterfield some evenings. The doctor was a character, if ever there was one. I just used to like waiting at table when he was there. The stories he told! Ooh! Tales about the people in his country. All sorts of tales, and about the natives who cut off the heads of dead people and reduced them to the size of an orange, and that kind of thing. Mrs Montrose would write them down sometimes, even at dinner. And all the time, the little doctor would laugh and smile and look as though he was telling smutty stories.”
“He brought his own ping-pong balls with him, didn’t he, Miss Lacy?”
“Yes, he did. Before he came the Blakes didn’t have one and they couldn’t be bought, either. He gave a whole box of them to Mrs Blake. My! Could he play! He was like lightning.”
Bony thoroughly enjoyed the evening, though it cost him an effort to tell of his own activities in the newspaper world of Johannesburg. Mrs Farn provided a light supper of tea and sandwiches and her brother came in in time to join them.
At half past ten the party broke up, Bony gallantly escorting Ethel to her parents’ home. He was her very first escort who did not evince a passionate desire to kiss her good night, and for several days she was unable to make up her mind whether she was pleased about that or not.
He reached Rose Cottage at eleven. Miss Pinkney had retired, leaving in his room a bottle of whisky and a barrel of biscuits. He spent two hours going through the official file again, and when eventually he poured himself a drink and munched a biscuit, he was frowning.
Chapter Nineteen
An Unexpected Ally<
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It was Friday morning, and Napoleon Bonaparte strolled along the shady side of Swanston Street, pleased with the world in general and with the prospect of meeting Nancy Chesterfield in particular. He had dawdled over morning tea and the newspapers, and now intended interviewing the Australian publishers of the internationally known I.R. Watts.
Arrived at the offices of the Monarch Publishing Company, he asked to see someone in authority.
“My name is Napoleon Bonaparte,” he said bluntly to a large man behind a resplendent desk. “I am a visitor to this country from South Africa, where I am known as an author and journalist. I am a strong admirer of the works of I.R. Watts. You publish his books, and you would be bestowing a great favour on me if you gave me his address.”
“That, I regret, I cannot do, Mr—er—Bonaparte,” stated the large man. “It would be against the fixed policy of this firm to give to anyone the address of its authors. However, if you care to write to I.R. Watts, I’ll have the letter forwarded.”
“I thank you. Yes, perhaps that will be the best way,” Bony agreed. “Could you relent so far as to inform me if I.R. Watts is living in this State?”
“Oh yes, that is so.”
“Thank you. Forgive me for presuming once more. Can you tell me exactly what is commercial fiction?”
The publisher smiled as he might at a harmless lunatic.
“Commercial fiction is any piece of fiction that will sell.”
“Oh! What, then, is literature?”
“Same thing, with the addition of non-fictional writings up to standard for offering for sale.”
“Ah! The same thing!” Bony murmured. “Thank you. I have been given to understand that in this country there is a distinct difference between literature and commercial fiction.”
The publisher smiled, saying, “The distinction doesn’t exist in any publishing house anywhere in the world.”
“Again I thank you, sir,” Bony said. “I haven’t read any Australian authors other than I.R. Watts. May I assume that there are other masters of Australian literature?”
“Thousands of ’em, Mr Bonaparte, tens of thousands of them. A master of literature is the man, or the woman, who enters a bookshop or a library with money to spend on books.”
“Just so! Very neat indeed,” Bony exclaimed. “I thank you. Good morning. I’ll write to I.R. through this address.”
Still pleased with the world, Bony walked down Swanston Street, strolled in and out of several book shops, filling in time until he came to stand outside the main entrance of the newspaper building where Nancy Chesterfield marketed vanity. He continued to stand there until three minutes past one o’clock, the time set for his luncheon appointment. When he went up in the lift it was four minutes past one, and when he entered Nancy Chesterfield’s office he was exactly five minutes late.
“Why, it’s Inspector Bonaparte!” she exclaimed.
“My apologies for being late, Miss Chesterfield. I was detained on a quest for information. There is no need to ask after your health.”
“Neither is there need to ask after your own,” she countered, her brows arched.
“My health concerns me less than my appetite. I could eat—anything.”
She was putting on her gloves, and she looked up from them to say, “You have no regrets for having deceived a poor female?”
“I am the gayest deceiver in the country.”
The blue eyes clouded. “What is it you want from me?” she asked, her voice brittle.
“Table companionship, the envy of other men, and to be informed on the difference between literature and commercial fiction. In return, I am able to give—well, very little. You see, I am a person of no importance in the political, the social, or the literary world. How did you unmask me?”
The cloud vanished from her eyes, and her voice shed its brittleness.
“That was easy,” she said. “After you left the other day I rang through to the morgue—that’s our Records Room, you know. They found your name easily enough, your profession, all about you, even that you caught a swordfish weighing over four hundred pounds.”
Bony laughed without restraint, and she laughed with him.
“And I went to no end of trouble in having the editor of the Johannesburg Age prepared to receive an inquiry about me. Alas, I am becoming too famous. Well, do we go along?”
“Of course, Mr Bonaparte. I would have been disappointed had your courage failed you.”
He opened the door and she passed into the corridor. He said, before they reached the lift, “My courage often fails, Miss Chesterfield, but my will to succeed, never.”
“To succeed in what?”
“In what I set out to accomplish.”
They talked of nothing as they descended to the street level, and he accompanied her to her car parked outside the building. They continued to talk of nothing as they drove to a women’s club in Spencer Street.
“Being a foreigner in Victoria, Mr Bonaparte, you are lunching with me,” she explained. “You want to talk to me, don’t you? Cross-examine me, and the rest of it? As a matter of fact, I want to talk to you. Here we may talk.”
“You are being exceedingly generous,” he said, quietly.
She examined him with thoughtful appraisement, liking the cut of his light-grey suit, the expensive shirt, the tasteful tie. She liked his face and the shape of his head, and the way he did his hair. He was a new experience to her, and she was liking that, too.
Herself smartly tailored in a blue-grey suit, with a suggestion of flame in the soft red of her blouse, and wearing a small black hat that threw into relief the tint of her perfectly coiffured hair, Nancy Chesterfield was an experience quite new to Napoleon Bonaparte. As they faced each other across the white and silver table, the eyes of two fencing masters clashed, held firmly. She was the first to speak, and she astonished him.
“If you want any assistance in this Mervyn Blake business, I’ll give you all I can.”
“Mervyn Blake business!” he echoed.
“It is why you are staying with Miss Pinkney. It is why—” and she smiled—“you are pursuing me.”
“It is admitted, Miss Chesterfield.”
“I have a friend in the C.I.B. who knows something of you,” she told him. “He said that in certain circles you are known as the man who never fails.”
“Partially true, only partially, Miss Chesterfield. I have failed to instil into my eldest son’s mind the necessity for conservative spending. I have failed my long-suffering wife. I have—”
“Never failed to—the word is finalize, and I like it—never failed to finalize an investigation.”
“I have certainly been fortunate in my professional career,” he said, unsmilingly.
“To what do you owe your uninterrupted successes? It sounds as though I were interviewing you, doesn’t it?”
“I think I owe it to patience, to a disregard of inconvenient orders from superiors, and to a slight knowledge of human psychology.”
“And,” she took him up, “to an extraordinary mixture of pride and humility. You had a lot of hurdles to get over, didn’t you? Almost as many as confronted me. We have the same type of mind, Mr Bonaparte. We started, I imagine, from the same scratch line. Mervyn Blake was like us, but he failed. We have been successful because we love our work. He failed because he wanted the rewards with all his passionate heart, without having to work too hard for them. For him, writing was a means to an end, and the end was fame. With us, were we creative writers, the end would be the joy in creative writing and the fame to go to hell. I liked Mervyn Blake. He had many fine qualities. I want to help you unearth his murderer.” Her mouth tightened, and then she asked, “May I call you Nap?”
It brought the flashing smile.
“If it pleases you,” he told her. “If you want to please me, call me Bony.”
“Bony it shall be, and you shall call me Nan. Don’t think me swift, because I’m not really. I want you to treat me as an all
y, not a suspect, and I want you to accept the relationship without any waste of time. Don’t let us fence any longer. We both know that Mervyn Blake didn’t just die.”
His gaze dropped to his food. Of what he was thinking she could not guess, but she was sure he was not seeking an advantage. For a full minute neither spoke. Then he was looking at her as no man ever had regarded her. In another it would have been an insult. His bright blue eyes began with an examination of her clothes, and continued with an examination of feature by feature until finally they gazed with penetrating steadiness into her own eyes.
He said, “Are you prepared to give me your full confidence and be satisfied with only a portion of mine?”
She nodded, and he asked, “When shall we begin?”
“Now, if you like.”
“Very well. Why are you so sure that Mervyn Blake was murdered?”
“I don’t know why. I can’t tell you.”
“Do you know of a probable motive for killing him?”
She shook her head.
“You must not be offended if I throw your words back to you,” he warned. “You said just now that Blake wanted the rewards but did not like the work that earned them. Will you enlarge on that?”
“I didn’t say that he disliked the work of writing,” Nancy asserted. “He liked it well enough, but it took second place to the ambition to be famous. He wasn’t the great man a number of people thought he was, and he knew it. He had in high degree the gift of word painting, and in low degree the gift of telling a story. The division of those two gifts is even greater in Wilcannia-Smythe, but he is more accomplished in deluding himself.”
“I confess that I don’t see where this affair begins and where it ends,” Bony said. “I find myself unable to make a reasonably accurate assessment of the importance of these people. I am very feminine in my gift of intuition, and I have felt, and still do, that the motive for killing Blake, if he was murdered, lies somewhere in a distinction between what is termed literature and commercial fiction. Bagshott may have thrown me out of gear. On the other hand, he might very well have pointed out the track for me to follow. Am I right in assuming that a great novelist has in high degree the gift of story-telling added to the gift of word painting?”
An Author Bites the Dust Page 14
