Choice of Evils

by E. X. Ferrars

  They finished their drinks and went through to the dining-room.

  Edward Clarke was very silent throughout the meal, as indeed it was difficult not to be since Magda Braile kept up an incessant chatter. But he looked as if he had something on his mind.

  In one of the pauses in the actress's talk, Andrew asked him, ‘Are you worrying about the show this evening?’

  'Somewhat, yes,’ Clarke replied. ‘A kind of stage fright perhaps. But everything's gone so well so far, I don't see why we shouldn't have a success with this too.’

  ‘Oh, he's dead scared that I'm not the right person for the Duchess,’ Magda said with a titter. She reached out a hand and laid it on one of Clarke's. ‘You poor dear, you really needn't be frightened. When I get to work, I'm very disciplined. But talking of being frightened, I did scare Simon, didn't I? I didn't mean to in the least, but I could see it in his eyes when he first saw me, he was dead scared.’

  ‘And how you enjoyed it,’ Nicholl said sourly. ‘But you needn't worry, Clarke. She'll pull herself together this evening. She tends to put on this sort of show before a performance. Nerves, I suppose. But sometimes she'll do the opposite and go dead silent. I'm not sure which is the harder to put up with.’

  ‘How horrid you can be!’ Magda exclaimed. ‘I don't know why I put up with you.’

  She went on with her chatter, mostly about Simon and how he had gone to Oxford and later broken her heart by falling in love with a woman whom he had insisted on marrying. She did not make it quite clear whether or not she had ever met the woman. Andrew found it a relief when coffee had been drunk and the party had broken up.

  He went up to his room, intending to start reading the book that he had bought that morning, but making the mistake of lying down on his bed instead of sitting in his armchair, he was sound asleep in a few minutes. The sea and the unwonted exercise had made him very drowsy. He slept until nearly five o'clock when he was woken by the telephone ringing. Peter again, he presumed.

  He was right, but he was startled by the tone of Peter's voice. It sounded high and excited, and he spoke very hurriedly, as if he were afraid of being caught at the telephone.

  ‘Andrew, please come here as quickly as you can!’ Peter said. ‘At once! Please!’

  ‘But why?’ Andrew asked. ‘What's happened?’

  ‘I can't explain now,’ Peter said. 'Someone else wants the telephone. But come- ’

  He stopped abruptly, and the dialling tone rang in Andrew's ears.

  He put the telephone down and stood for a moment, looking at it in a perplexed way. He was quite ready to respond to Peter's anxious demand, but there were several matters to be solved before he could do so. First of all he had to discover Simon Amory's address. When Peter had driven him up to the house the evening before it had not occurred to him to mention its name or the name of the road where it stood. Now, if there was really a need for haste, the obvious thing would be to get a taxi, rather than to walk, though he remembered the distance as not very great. That the hotel people would certainly be able to solve for him. But first he must find the address. There was no telephone directory in his room, so he put a call through to the desk downstairs and asked them to find the address of Simon Amory.

  They were slower about it than he had expected, but at last an answer came.

  ‘I think Mr Amory's number is ex-directory,’ a woman's voice said. T can't find it.’

  This, after all, was not surprising, but for a moment Andrew felt completely baffled. Then he said, ‘Oh, hold on a minute. Can you find the number of Miss Todhunter? be able to give me the address I want.’

  There was another pause, then the voice replied, ‘Yes, here it is. Gallmouth 850415.’

  ‘Will you put me through to that number then, please?’ In a moment he heard the ringing tone begin.

  It rang six times before the telephone at the other end was lifted and a gruff voice said, 'Mina Todhunter speaking.’

  ‘This is Andrew Basnett,’ Andrew said. ‘I'm sorry to trouble you, Miss Todhunter, but I need to get Simon Amory's address. It appears I'm wanted there rather urgently, and the fact is that although I was there for dinner yesterday evening, I didn't think of noticing the address. And it isn't in the telephone directory.’

  ‘That's right, it isn't,’ Mina Todhunter answered. ‘He was always getting bothered by people wanting to inter-view him, or to get money from him for some cause or other, or just to meet him, so that he decided to be ex-directory. I believe it's helped. He's really a very retiring person, and he didn't like the incessant intrusion. But as a matter of fact, he's here now. Would you like to speak to him?’

  Andrew felt that he had no desire to speak to Amory until he had spoken to Peter.

  ‘Oh, I don't want to trouble him,’ he said. ‘But if you could just give me that address …’

  ‘Yes, of course, it's Barnfield House, Cranleigh Road. If you're going by taxi, it'll only take you a few minutes. But please forgive my asking, is there something wrong that you're needed so urgently? I mean, your charming young nephew hasn't hurt himself, or anything?’

  ‘I'm afraid I don't know,’ Andrew answered. ‘I don't think that's the trouble, because it was he who phoned me. But he did sound rather as if something was wrong. Thank you for giving me that address. I'm sorry to have troubled you.’

  ‘A pleasure/ she said. T hope we may meet again. If you're staying on in Gallmouth for a little while perhaps you could find time to come in for a drink with me. Just call in when you're passing. You would be most welcome.’

  Impatience began to grip Andrew. 'Thank you, thank you, I'll do that. Goodbye.’

  He put the telephone down, hurriedly put on the shoes that he had kicked off when he lay down on the bed, went out and summoned the lift to take him downstairs. There he asked the woman on the reception desk to call a taxi for him, then he went to wait at the entrance door to the hotel.

  As the minutes passed his impatience mounted, with growing anxiety that Peter would never have called him in the way he had unless something truly was wrong. Peter was a person who seemed never to worry unduly. He treated troubles which would have profoundly upset many people with casual acceptance. In his way, Andrew supposed, he had a good deal of courage. He could be casual because he was not afraid. Yet today it really sounded as if something had scared him.

  It was actually a very short time before the taxi came, though to Andrew, waiting at the door, it seemed so long that he began to doubt if it was coming at all. Once he went indoors to the desk to ask the receptionist if she was sure that a taxi had been available when she called. She reassured him, and it was only a few minutes later that it arrived. Andrew gave the address of Barnfield House, Cranleigh Road, and wondered why the driver seemed to take so long compared with the drive in the Rolls the evening before.

  But the taxi was not able to drive up to the gate of the house. It was stopped by a constable some yards before it reached the gates. There were police cars there in the road, and an ambulance and a number of men, some in uniform, some in plain clothes. Andrew leapt out of the taxi, and thrust his way forward to the gates. From there he could see that the centre of interest for all these people was the summerhouse among the holly trees. The door was open and although it was hardly dusk yet there was a light shining out of it. While he was standing there, with a cold sense of apprehension holding him rigid, he saw two men approach the door, carrying an empty stretcher.

  CHAPTER 4

  Andrew talked his way into the house. First a massive constable stopped him, then a sergeant. But the statement that he had been summoned by Peter Dilly acted like a password. The sergeant told him that the inspector would want to speak to him, but that meanwhile he could wait in the house. He went in and found Peter standing on the stairs, as if that was the place where he felt best able to keep out of the way of the men who were in the drawing-room and the dining-room and yet keep an eye on what was going on there.

  As soon as Peter saw Andrew he
came leaping down the stairs, grasped him by an elbow and pulled him towards them.

  ‘Come up to my room,’ he said in a tense whisper. ‘I've been watching for you. I'm glad you got here.’

  ‘But what's happened?’ Andrew asked as he let himself be hurried upstairs, and then, more emphatically, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Rachel,’ Peter answered.

  ‘Rachel? And it's murder?’

  ‘It could hardly be anything else, could it, with all that lot down there?’

  'She's dead?’

  'Shot through the back of her head - and I found her. I was alone in the house. That's why I got hold of you. I didn't know where anyone was and I couldn't stand being alone here.’

  Peter opened the door of one of the bedrooms on the first floor and led the way into it. It was a small charming room with white walls, like most of the rest of the house, grey wall-to-wall carpeting, a yellow and white cover on the bed and bright yellow curtains. A door opened out of it into a small bathroom. There was an armchair by the window into which Peter flung himself, then immediately stood up, leaving it for Andrew, throwing himself down on the bed, then jumping up again, drawing the curtains, then taking two or three rapid turns backwards and forwards in the room.

  When Andrew sat down in the chair Peter came to stand in front of him.

  ‘I didn't know what to do once I'd called the police,’ he said. ‘I knew I had to do that and they came pretty quickly, but then I thought of getting hold of you. You've had some experience of this sort of thing. You've helped the police before. There was that affair of the dinner where the man got poisoned with cyanide, and the time that QC got blown up by a bomb. I had a feeling the inspector had heard of you, anyway he let me telephone you and said he'd want to talk to you when you came. I expect he'll want to do that quite soon, so I'd better get on and tell you what's happened.’

  ‘How is it you're alone in the house?’ Andrew asked. ‘Where are that couple - the cook and the manservant?’

  ‘It's their afternoon off. They cleared up the lunch, then they went off to the cinema, and I don't know where Simon is. I'd been out on my own, exploring the town a little, since it was obvious he wanted to be left in peace and the strange thing is I actually saw Rachel only an hour or so before she was killed. I saw her come out of a house in one of those rather grand Regency crescents in the middle of the town. I was strolling along and I suddenly saw her come dashing out of one of them and go striding off in this direction. She didn't see me. But out of curiosity I went past the house she'd come out of and I saw a brass plate beside the door with the names Merridew Clarke Latham on it. Solicitors, I think.’

  ‘Clarke,’ Andrew said. ‘You're sure of that?’

  ‘Oh yes, because I thought just what you're thinking now, that she'd been to see that man Edward Clarke, and for some reason seeing him had got her into a pretty excited state. That was what she looked, at any rate. Well, I didn't come home immediately, but when I did I natur-ally expected to find her here, and when I didn't I assumed she was lying down in her room. Then I began to feel uneasy, not because of her, but because there was no sign of Simon. I'd realized he didn't worry at leaving his guests to look after themselves, then I began to get annoyed about it. I thought he went a bit far with it and that it was really bloody ill-mannered, so I thought I'd go out and interrupt genius at work in his summerhouse. Then a funny thing struck me. It wasn't dark yet, but you'd have expected anyone who was working in that place to have wanted a light. But there was no light in the window. So I thought the story of his wanting to work there was just a yarn and that he was probably sound asleep on his sofa. And I went out there and knocked and got no answer, so I opened the door and … and there she was, Andrew. It was a fearful shock. She was lying on the floor in the middle of the room, with what looked like the back of her head blown away, and there was a lot of blood Peter's voice began to shake. 'That's what they've told me had happened. She'd been shot at close range through the back of her head, so it couldn't have been suicide, it was murder. For one thing there was no gun there. The murderer took it away with him.’

  ‘You've told all this to the police, have you?’ Andrew said.

  ‘Oh, yes, and a lot more, about what I'm doing here and so on. And I think I'm at the top of their list of suspects. Don't they say that if it isn't a family affair, when the husband or the wife comes first, then the person who reports the finding of the body is the prime suspect. I'm very glad you're here, because talking to you is giving me back some sense of proportion. I've been feeling bloody scared, that's the truth.’

  ‘I doubt if you need be,’ Andrew said. 'There's a fact you haven't mentioned, that you met Rachel Rayne for the first time yesterday. That's true, isn't it, Peter?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Well, that doesn't give you much time for working up a motive for killing her, unless, of course, you're one of those people who need to do a little killing from time to time just to keep themselves going. No, I shouldn't complicate things by imagining you're going to be suspected of murder. But I believe I know something that you don't. I know where Simon Amory is. He's with Mina Todhunter.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Peter asked.

  ‘When you telephoned me to come up here you omitted to give me the address of the house, and it isn't in the telephone directory, so I phoned Miss Todhunter, and asked her for it. And she mentioned that he was with her and asked me if I wanted to speak to him. I said I didn't want to trouble him and that the address was all I wanted, and that was that. Of course, I can't really swear that he was there, as I didn't speak to him, but if he wasn't she wouldn't have risked asking me if I wanted to speak to him, would she?’

  ‘No. No, I see what you mean. So you don't think he's a suspect either.’ Peter dropped down on to the bed again, giving a sigh, as if he felt that he had shed a load. He even managed to give a small smile. ‘Yet he's the obvious person, isn't he? I mean, so far as we know, he's the only person with a relationship with Rachel that goes farther back than a week ago, when I believe she arrived.’

  ‘We don't know that for certain, do we?’ Andrew said.

  ‘What was she doing, visiting Clarke this afternoon, if she didn't know him a bit better than appears. Incidentally, what was he doing in his office on a Saturday afternoon? I believe that's unusual for a solicitor. And what was she doing visiting Todhunter yesterday morning?’

  'She said she'd gone to her for advice and had been given a brush-off.’

  ‘Yes, and of course that needn't mean that she'd known her before she came here. She was asking me for advice only a little while later. And I gave her a brush-off too, about which I'm beginning to feel pretty bad. Perhaps if I'd listened to her, helped with her problem, whatever it was, this fearful thing wouldn't have happened.’

  ‘Do you think it was for that advice that she went to Clarke?’

  ‘It's what one usually goes to solicitors for.’

  Peter stood up once more and again began to roam restlessly about the small room.

  ‘D'you remember how excited she got when I said her sister had died intestate?’ he said.

  Andrew nodded.

  ‘Well, suppose you were right,’ Peter went on, ‘and that the Amorys weren't really married, which would make Rachel her sister's heir. And suppose her sister had far more money than we know about, and she went to see Clarke to check up on what you told her about intestacy, mightn't that make her quite a menace to Amory?’

  ‘Except that he's got lots of money of his own, so I don't see why he would grudge it her. Besides that, as I told you, he was with Mina Todhunter this afternoon.’

  ‘Ah, but what time was that?’ Peter asked quickly. ‘If it was after I telephoned you, it was after five o'clock. And I think it was about three o'clock when I saw Rachel come out of Clarke's office. So there's something like two hours that Amory's got to account for. I believe he and Todhunter had a habit of playing chess on most Saturday afternoons, and she may be
able to give him an alibi for all that time, but perhaps not/

  ‘I don't suppose they've told you anything about when they think the murder happened,’ Andrew said.

  ‘No, but I think the forensic people have got here by now,’ Peter said. 'So they may know a little more about it themselves. I know fingerprint people and photographers and all that lot have got here. And I'm sorry to have hauled you into this, because now you're here, they may keep you.’

  ‘I imagine they'd have hauled me in anyhow,’ Andrew said. 'They'll be questioning all the people Rachel's been with since she got here. I wonder if this is going to affect the festival. Will they go ahead with The Duchess of Malfi, or will it be cancelled?’

  ‘I don't see why it should be. None of the people Rachel's had anything to do with since she got here is involved in the play.’

  ‘What about Clarke? Isn't he Chairman of the whole show?’

  ‘Then I should expect him to make every effort to let things go ahead without any interruption.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you're right.’

  The door opened. A constable looked into the room.

  ‘Professor Basnett?’ he said. ‘Detective Inspector Mayhew would like to speak to you.’

  Detective Inspector Mayhew was a tall, solidly built man with a heavy, square face in the middle of which the features seemed to occupy too little space. They were all small. His eyes were small, pale grey and close together above a short nose. His mouth was narrow-lipped and seemed to be gathered up into an expression of continuous distrust. His forehead was high, with the dark hair receding from it. His ears were surprisingly large and somewhat protuberant. Not at all a good-looking man, but with a certain impressive power about him.

  He was seated at the long table in the dining-room. A much younger man was also seated at the table, with a collection of papers in front of him, on which he appeared to have been taking notes. A sergeant, Andrew guessed. The inspector waved Andrew to a chair, then gave him a long, steady look, as if he were memorizing him for use on some future occasion.