Paul Temple and the Kelby Affair

by Francis Durbridge

  ‘Thank you.’ Steve sat on a leather sofa and watched the man enjoying his own performance. She couldn’t quite make out whether his amiability was sinister or his menace an illusion.

  Paul heard the voice on the other end of the line as Grover said: ‘Good evening. I’ve spoken to you once before, Mr Kelby, on the night your father disappeared. The night you killed him and took the body to Galloway Farm.’ He nodded to Paul, confirming that he was speaking to the same man as before.

  ‘I’m Arthur Grover, and you know perfectly well what I’m talking about! Your father was alive when we left him in the gardener’s shed – he was alive when you found him.’ There was a long pause. Paul wondered whether the person at the other end of the line had hung up. Suddenly Grover winked. ‘Yes, Mr Kelby, of course I can prove it! I have a photograph of you carrying the body out of the shed.’

  The man on the other end began talking quickly and excitedly. Grover gave Paul the thumbs up sign. The trick had worked.

  ‘Come along, Steve, let’s go and enjoy that meal.’

  They left the office and went downstairs to the dining room.

  ‘That was hardly a conclusive phone call,’ Steve said. ‘What’s going to happen now?’

  ‘Grover is arranging to meet the man who killed Alfred Kelby. To hand over the photographs.’

  She smiled knowingly. ‘But instead of Grover you’ll keep the appointment?’

  ‘That’s right, Steve. Tomorrow morning at Marlow. Eleven o’clock.’

  Steve sat nervously at the table and glanced at the menu. ‘Couldn’t we eat at a restaurant where the waiters are masculine and dressed as all-in wrestlers?’ she sighed. ‘From now on the evening out belongs to me.’

  It was one o’clock when they got back home, but there were a surprising number of people about. There were two police cars in the mews and an ambulance arrived as Paul was getting out of the car. The others seemed to be passers-by with nothing better to do at night than watch a girl lying dead on the pavement.

  ‘Oh God,’ Paul muttered. ‘He’s got Jennie!’

  She was wearing the outfit she had worn the previous night, and in the sulphur light from the street lamps her body could be seen twisted and smashed through the nylon. The huge puddle of blood was black in the light. She looked, Paul thought bitterly, like a child’s broken doll.

  Kate Balfour was talking to the police, telling them she had been with the girl all evening until at midnight she had popped home to fetch her sleeping things. ‘I was only gone fifteen minutes…’

  Paul knelt beside the girl and touched her cold face. She had fallen the fifty feet from the guest room window. He glanced up. It was meant to look like suicide.

  ‘Poor girl,’ Steve said quietly. ‘She was so innocent really. I almost got to like her.’

  Chapter 14

  PAUL TEMPLE leaned over the parapet and looked down into the murky water. It was a fine morning and the sun was shining across the Thames; but the water was brown. Paul gestured to the police launch below. A uniformed sergeant and two plain-clothes men were ready. Paul glanced at his watch. Ten minutes to eleven.

  Eight boys came rowing round the river bend. They were being yelled at through a megaphone: ‘in-out-in-out, Bunter, in-out,’ by an insane schoolmaster riding along the towpath on a bicycle. Paul watched in fascination to see whether the schoolmaster would ride into the river, but he didn’t. He whisked up onto the bridge, rode past Paul and down onto the towpath on the opposite bank. ‘In-out-in-out.’

  Paul wondered uneasily which direction the killer would come from. It would be unthinkable, he thought ironically, to be killed without ever knowing it. He walked to the south end of the bridge and stared down the road from Henley. Of course, the killer might have been waiting the past two hours in the hotel by the river. The Compleat Angler. That would be the wisest place, to ensure that no ambush was set up. Paul strolled back to the north side. A Ford Zephyr police car was parked in the private entrance to a boatyard a few yards downstream. Then the clock struck eleven.

  He had never established whether Gladys had been stabbed in the back, or whether the knife had been thrown by an expert at twenty yards. Paul braced his shoulders and turned round. The protection seemed an awful long way away. He felt rather conspicuous alone on the bridge.

  A Rover 2000 was coming along the road from Henley. When it reached The Compleat Angler it turned off into the car park. Paul waited, and a few moments later Scott Reed came from the car park. He was scurrying towards the bridge like a nervous crab. The police had not moved.

  Suddenly Scott Reed saw Paul on the bridge. His hand twitched involuntarily in the beginnings of a wave, then he stopped. He glanced backwards and forwards before hurrying down the steps to the towpath.

  ‘Scott!’ Paul shouted.

  Paul ran to the stairs and called down to the publisher.

  ‘Scott! What the hell are you doing here?’

  Scott came up the stairs as four policemen converged on him from the nearby boathouse and the hotel. He smiled ingratiatingly.

  ‘Oh, hello, Paul. I just came to see—’

  ‘You damned fool,’ Paul snapped. ‘Don’t you realise that you’ve upset the whole operation?’

  ‘I was worried after what you told me yesterday. I just had to come—’

  ‘Temple, look out!’ someone shouted.

  Paul swung round in time to see a man racing towards him from the opposite end of the bridge. Two more policemen were pursuing Leo Ashwood in Paul’s direction. Leo stopped and drew a gun from his pocket. He fired a couple of shots, one at Paul and the second behind him at the police. When Paul peered cautiously round the side of the stone stairs a policeman was lying in a pool of blood, and Leo Ashwood was standing on the parapet. Nothing seemed to be happening.

  ‘Leo,’ Paul called, ‘don’t be silly. You’re making things worse.’

  ‘I’ll shoot! Leave me alone!’

  The stolid manservant was flourishing his gun with a wildness entirely due to panic. Paul hoped that the desperation would make his aim inaccurate.

  ‘You can’t escape,’ Paul called. ‘So let’s be sensible. I’ll come and collect the gun from you, and then the police will look after you. All right? I’m coming out!’

  Paul stepped onto the bridge. He walked slowly along the pavement towards the centre. He felt extraordinarily relaxed, interested to find himself behaving like this and coldly rational about the even money that Leo might shoot. He felt slightly sorry for Leo. The man was terrified and trapped.

  ‘I’ll shoot,’ Leo shouted. ‘Don’t think I won’t kill you! You tricked me with that telephone call! Keep away, you bastard! You tricked me!’

  Paul continued his walk towards him. He thought disinterestedly that Leo was talking in clichés. People under stress always fall back on clichés. Paul decided that if he lived to write his serious study of murder he would have to remember that. No elegant dialogue during the death throes. Whilst he was thinking this he was simultaneously aware of a car moving behind him. The fools, he thought to himself, they’ll ruin everything!

  ‘I’ll shoot,’ Leo shouted, a pleading tone adding to his desperation. ‘Don’t think I won’t. I’ll shoot!’

  The Ford Zephyr had roared onto the bridge and it screeched to a halt beside the shot policeman. Its four doors flew open and three uniformed policemen sprang into the open. The fourth door had been opened by Charlie Vosper, but he didn’t offer himself as a target. He waited until Leo had fired two more shots before emerging.

  Leo was as surprised at the explosion of the gun as the policeman whose arm was splintered by a bullet. He staggered sideways and lost his balance. Paul ran forward to grab his legs, but Leo was waving his arms about as he toppled from the bridge. The gun went off again, harmlessly into the stonework of the bridge, while Paul tried to hang on to the ankle. Charlie Vosper grabbed the other leg, but Leo was too heavy. He fell with a scream into the river below.

  ‘You’re a bloody h
ero, aren’t you?’ Vosper snarled.

  ‘It would have worked,’ Paul said calmly.

  Leo was swimming against the current now, swimming towards the bank as the police launch roared into action. It swung out into the centre of the river and headed for the same spot on the bank. But Leo was clearly not a strong swimmer and his clothes were hindering him. He disappeared underwater once, then reappeared splashing and spluttering. The police launch changed course and went straight for him.

  ‘In-out-in-out! Come along there, Bunter, pull your weight. In-out!’

  The insane schoolmaster whisked across the bridge, skidded past the shot policeman, and came to a halt in a heap by the Ford Zephyr. His megaphone landed at Paul’s feet.

  The eight schoolboys lost their rhythm and drifted chaotically into the path of the police launch. The sixteen oars began clicking against each other and the boat swung sideways onto the current before tipping onto its side.

  Leo screamed for help as he came up for the second time.

  But the police launch had hit the rowing boat. An awful crack of splintering wood was followed by schoolboy shouts of dismay. While the three policemen concentrated on rescuing the boys Leo Ashwood drowned.

  Chapter 15

  STEVE put the little black number back into the wardrobe as she heard the door open downstairs. He was back. Steve peered over the balcony to watch him arrive in the living room. She didn’t dare move or call out, not until she had seen…It was a feeling she had experienced before and it only lasted for a few seconds. A feeling of dread.

  ‘Steve! It’s me!’ Paul shouted cheerfully.

  ‘Hi.’ She waved over the balcony and then came down the spiral staircase. ‘You sound as if it all went well.’ She was the sensible, coolly poised wife again, apart from the smile that extended almost into a grin.

  ‘It didn’t go too well,’ he said happily. ‘It’s always bad when a man is dragged off by the currents and drowned. And a couple of policemen received minor injuries. The best we can say is that events have reached a formally predetermined conclusion. The pattern has been completed.’

  ‘You pompous idiot,’ Steve laughed.

  ‘All right, so who’s a superstitious ninny?’ he teased. ‘You were invoking the spirits over that black dress again, weren’t you?’

  She hung her head. ‘It worked,’ she murmured.

  He kissed her lightly on top of the head.

  ‘I’m always glad when a case is over,’ he admitted. ‘I’ll be able to do some work now. At nine o’clock tomorrow morning I’ll be starting work, office hours, nine to five. I’m looking forward to the dull routine again.’ He sat at the huge desk and patted the typewriter like an old friend. ‘Nothing but boredom for the next few weeks, I’m pleased to say.’ He swung round on the swivel chair. ‘Speaking of boredom, Scott Reed invited us down to Hambledon for dinner tonight.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Steve. ‘Do we have to?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Paul smiled reassuringly. ‘I told him we’d go out to that pub in Hindhead for supper.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she began cautiously. ‘Won’t that be work again? You’ll be researching into that heavyweight study of murder!’ She flounced into the kitchen. ‘When am I going to be given a treat because you want to give me a treat? I refuse to come!’

  The restaurant behind the pub overlooked the Devil’s Punchbowl, a massive dip in the Surrey downs lined with trees and bracken on every side. The main road south wound partly along the top of the rim in a perilous arc, and as darkness fell the bowl itself was lost in inky nothing and the stream of headlamps cutting through the night became yellow and mysterious. Paul felt as if they were dining on the edge of the world, watching a Gadarene stampede of cars in the distance.

  ‘You’re not very good company, darling,’ Steve intruded into his thoughts.

  ‘Eh? No, I’m sorry. I was thinking about the Kelby affair. It was boorish of me.’ He tucked into the vegetable soup and said something about soup like they used to make soup.

  ‘I know how you must feel,’ Scott’s wife said sympathetically. ‘I should think the end of a murder case must leave one very sad, like having made love in the afternoon.’

  Paul smiled. ‘Yes, it is something like that.’ He began talking about the case before Scott Reed could challenge his wife about her analogy. He explained about the trap they had set to catch Leo.

  ‘I had to tell Scott what I was doing,’ he explained, ‘because I needed the information about Kelby’s will. And the stubborn devil refused to give it to me unless I took him into my confidence.’ Scott was smiling and sitting there with his slimly dignified wife as if the world began and ended with first editions of significant modern novels. He didn’t want to know when she last made love in the afternoon. ‘Kelby was about to make a new will in favour of his son.’

  ‘I suppose Leo Ashwood knew that,’ said Steve.

  ‘Precisely. He also knew that the current will was very much in his favour. Until Ronnie came home like a prodigal son Leo stood to inherit nearly everything. So he must have been pretty furious. Just waiting, in fact, for an opportunity such as Arthur Grover gave him.’

  ‘He could,’ Mrs Reed suggested bloodthirstily, ‘have simply bumped Kelby off in the night. Any night.’

  ‘Perhaps he meant to. But when Grover telephoned during the evening it was a marvellous opportunity. Ronnie was out with Tracy Leonard, remember, they were searching for Kelby. So the moment Grover said he had information—’

  ‘Leo,’ Steve interrupted, ‘pretended he was Ronnie Kelby.’

  ‘Right. He realised that his murder was ready and waiting to be committed. All Leo had to do was go into the gardener’s shed and strangle Alfred Kelby. Then he took the body across to Galloway Farm.’

  ‘In order to throw suspicion on Ted Mortimer.’

  ‘Yes.’ Paul tasted his ham and found it satisfactory. He ate a small piece of pineapple. ‘Ted Mortimer was a well-known enemy of nearly everybody in Melford Cross. Still is, I suppose, poor devil.’

  They continued eating in silence. Paul was wondering whether he could have saved the life of Jennie Mortimer.

  ‘I suppose,’ Steve said brightly, ‘that as soon as Arthur Grover rang up Melford House and said that he had some photographs of Leo disposing of the body, he knew who had taken the photographs. Jennie Mortimer’s life wasn’t worth living.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Paul asked. He filled his glass with more wine. ‘But how could she have taken the photographs?’

  ‘Well,’ she laughed, ‘I know there weren’t any photographs. But if Jennie had been meeting Kelby that night—’

  ‘She hadn’t been!’ Paul ate in silence for a full two minutes. He wished the tone of the conversation wasn’t so resolutely cheerful. He wished they didn’t expect him to be good company. They were casting accusing glances in his direction. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘Jennie did see Kelby in answer to that letter we found. She saw him at ten o’clock at their usual meeting place. But she saw him two weeks before he died.’

  Steve squeezed his leg in sympathy under the table. She shrugged helplessly, as if she knew what it was like. It was a nice gesture, and Paul smiled gratefully.

  ‘What about that shoe I was left with?’ Scott Reed asked insensitively. ‘Did Leo used to inherit Kelby’s old clothes?’

  ‘Well done, Scott!’ Paul genuinely laughed at the man’s enthusiasm to know all the trivial details. ‘Leo was wearing a pair of shoes he’d been given by Kelby. And poor Gladys! She came to see me because she knew her husband was the killer. When he had brought her back from the Melford Cross dry cleaners he had talked of Kelby being strangled, not just murdered. That was how she knew, although I expect she was beginning to guess the truth about Leo the day before she came to see me.’

  ‘She must have guessed,’ Steve agreed, convinced of the power of feminine intuition. ‘But how did you manage to get Ronnie out of the house so that Leo would take Grover’s second phone call
?’

  ‘That wasn’t easy. But I caught Tracy Leonard in a Christian frame of mind, and I persuaded her to take Ronnie to the cinema.’ He smiled to himself and then gestured to the wine waiter. ‘It wasn’t easy. She hates the sight of Ronnie, and he’s been making passes at her for weeks. I hope they won’t blame me if they eventually marry and live unhappily ever after.’

  He ordered another bottle of wine. It was a pleasantly euphoric evening, the ham and the wine and the open range coal fire lulled them comfortably into a mood of pastoral credulity. After an hour or so the real world became less real and guilt lost its edge of pain. Paul began telling them about the sailor who was hanged beside the pub so many years ago. It was a gothic, mythic world beyond the window, a world of good and evil and of cars hurtling towards the cliff of destruction, a country scene where devils drank punch and night was filled with electric storms.

  ‘Send for the landlord,’ said Paul. ‘He’ll know about the local folklore. Ask him to join us for the brandy.’

  Steve smiled, resigned herself to doing the driving back to London, and asked the landlord to join them. ‘My husband is researching a book on gratuitous death,’ she explained. The landlord had a morbid turn of mind as well. He joined them.

  ‘Local legend has it,’ he told Paul Temple, ‘that it was a ritual murder. Some secret cult being practised down there in the clearing.’ He was a bluff military type, a retired major, and the folklore would not disturb his sleep.

  ‘Why was it never solved?’ Paul asked him.

  ‘I don’t know. The police were out of their depth. We had an exactly similar murder here last month, and they aren’t making any progress with that. A good job it doesn’t happen very often.’

  ‘Exactly similar?’

  Paul and the landlord became lost in conversation. Steve recognised the eager interest her husband was showing. So much for the life of boredom they had been looking forward to. She turned to Scott Reed and his wife and began talking of plays they had seen and books they had read and whether Scott Reed’s son would become a publisher. She wished they had stayed at home that evening.