Frequent Hearses

by Edmund Crispin

  Miss Bryant sat very still. After a moment two large tears ran down her cheeks, leaving shining tracks in the powder. Both Fen and Humbleby were afraid she was going to break down, but the impact of Humbleby’s intelligence had numbed her, and she made no movement except to brush the tears away with the back of her hand. Presently she whispered:

  “Gloria always said she would.”

  “Would kill herself?”

  Miss Bryant nodded slowly. “An’ I didn’t believe ’er, ’cos they say it’s never the ones ’oo talk about it as actually does it.” Then she sat up abruptly as something occurred to her. “But she couldn’t a’ done, sir! Not after she got erself that big part in the ’istorical film. She was that pleased about it you wouldn’t believe, and—”

  “Yes,” Humbleby interposed. “We’ve heard about that, Miss Bryant, and that’s why we’re trying to discover some other reason—some reason sufficiently compelling to outweigh the contract for The Unfortunate Lady—why Miss Scott should have—um—made away with herself. Perhaps you can help us to do so.”

  But with a surprising firmness Miss Bryant indicated dissent.

  “She wouldn’t a’ done it, sir,” she said. “I swear she wouldn’t, I swear it!” And they glimpsed something like hysteria welling up towards the surface. “She was made away with, that’s what must ’ave appened.” Her voice rose sharply. “Some filthy devil—”

  “Rubbish, girl,” said Fen brusquely. “There were witnesses to the whole affair, and there’s not the slightest possibility that she was murdered. Put that out of your mind once and for all, and talk sensibly.”

  Then, seeing that the headlong gallop towards a nerve-storm was for the time being arrested, he added more gently: “It’s distressing and horrible, I know, but there’s nothing you or any of us can do about it.” And half to himself he murmured: “We owe God a death.”

  The girl looked up at him. “That’s a funny way of putting it.” Like others on other occasions, she was discovering that Fen, simply as a presence and a personality, was strangely reassuring to be with. He smiled at her, inspiritingly and without sentimentality, and said:

  “Rather a good way, don’t you think?”

  Humbleby, meanwhile, had produced his notebook.

  “Don’t worry about this,” he said. “I’m only going to take notes because I’m naturally forgetful.” And at this solemn assurance the mercurial spirits of youth healthily obliterated immediate grief, and Miss Bryant giggled.

  “’S all right,” she said, for the first time tolerably self-confident. “I know they say as ’ow I’m not much better than the Dumb Blonde in the Pic., but you don’t ’ave to treat me as if I was mental.” And she giggled again.

  “No, of course not.” Humbleby was much relieved at having the interview thus transferred to a less emotional level. “Let’s start at the beginning, then.” He poised his pencil. “Your name’s Valerie Bryant.”

  “Valerie Rose Bryant. Only Rose is a common name, I always say, so it’s not everyone I tells it to.” And with this naive access of coquetry Miss Bryant wriggled her bosom to a more comfortable position in the precarious grasp of her garment. “Ma always says—”

  Maternal obiter dicta, however, were not what Humbleby wanted, and he cut them short by saying: “And your age?”

  “Seventeen, sir.”

  “Seventeen?” Humbleby echoed weakly; this tall, beautifully poised girl looked at least twenty-five. “Seventeen, did you say?”

  “Yes, sir, seventeen.”

  “Oh. Ah. Right you are, then. And how long have you known Gloria Scott?”

  Miss Bryant wrinkled her pencilled brows and did a sum on her fingers. “Nearly a year now, sir. She was an extra at first, and we got chatting in the canteen one lunch-time.”

  “And you got to be close friends?”

  Once more a tear trickled destructively down Miss Bryant’s brownish-gold cheek. “She was lovely, sir,” she said—and her tone of voice conveyed so simple and uncritical an act of homage that Fen was almost startled.

  “And wonderfully clever, reelly she was. She was a reel actress—not just chorus like me, but a reel actress. I used to wonder what she saw in me, reelly I did.”

  And given that encomium, Fen thought, it was not difficult to envisage what the relationship between the two girls had been: on the one hand Gloria Scott, idolised and very much liking it, on the other this simple-minded child, as helplessly enslaved by high-falutin talk as was Desdemona by the narrated campaignings of Othello. The picture thus conjured up was, it occurred to Fen, a rather displeasing one, and the vague sympathy for Gloria Scott which Judy Flecker had implanted in him abated as he contemplated it.

  Some reflection of a similar sort had apparently struck Humbleby, too, for he frowned slightly before going on to say: “And ‘Gloria Scott’ wasn’t, I understand, her real name.”

  “No, sir, it wasn’t. She used to say ’er family was very well known and so she changed ’er name so as people wouldn’t be influenced in giving ’er jobs by knowing ’oo she was.”

  Yes, Fen thought, that’s exactly what she would say; as a clue it was valueless. And a curiosity as to the extent to which the girl confronting him had been in thrall to Gloria Scott impelled him to ask:

  “And was that true, do you think?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” Beneath her make-up Miss Bryant flushed, made wretched by her own disloyalty. “I wondered sometimes if p’raps she changed it just ’cos ’er own name wasn’t pretty enough for an actress.”

  “Her own name being?”

  Miss Bryant shook her head dumbly.

  “You don’t know what it was?”

  “No, sir.”

  Humbleby sighed. “Did she ever talk to you about any relatives? Or to your knowledge meet any relatives?”

  “No, sir, I never ’eard about anything like that. She seemed”—Miss Bryant’s voice trembled—“she seemed awfully alone, like, without anyone to turn to. She said once as ’ow ’er family wouldn’t approve if they knew she was in the films, so she wasn’t going to tell them till she’d made a name for erself.”

  “Then you got the impression that she’d run away from home?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s about it. Though she was always frightfully mysterious whenever I asked ’er outright, like.”

  “Being mysterious,” said Fen with deliberation, “is an easy way to make an impression, isn’t it?”

  She was quick to grasp the intention of the remark. “I know I was a fool about ’er, sir,” she said humbly. “Only no one like that ’ad ever wanted to be friends with me before and—and now she’s dead—and—”

  “And no longer needs an admiring audience,” said Fen. “You deserve a certain amount of admiration yourself, you know. Did she ever give it you?”

  She stared at him wonderingly. “Me, Sir?”

  “You’re a modest and good-hearted young woman with a very pretty face and a figure in a million.”

  Miss Bryant surveyed herself doubtfully.

  “I know I got good legs,” she admitted, “but—but—I don’t see—”

  “Don’t you?” Fen smiled at her, inwardly reflecting that the advancing years were evoking in him emotions of a discouragingly paternal and moralising sort. “If you think about it you will. It sounds to me as if what you had was a tyrant, not a friend. Isn’t that so?”

  And to his relief—for he was well aware that amateur therapies of the kind in which he had been indulging were perilously double-edged—she slowly nodded.

  “Yes, sir, I s’pose you could say it was a bit like that. Still, I got to stick by ’er, ’aven’t I?”

  “Yes,” said Fen gravely, “you must do that.”

  Though mildly amused by, and not unsympathetic to, this elementary display of spiritual healing, Humbleby was beginning to feel that the time had come to get back to business. He said:

  “And that being settled, there are one or two other things you can tell us. For instance, did
Miss Scott have any particular friends apart from yourself?”

  “Not that I know of, sir. Girl-friends, that’s to say. As to men—” She hesitated.

  “Yes, I was going to ask you about that. Go on.”

  “Well, she was very beautiful, sir,” said Miss Bryant rather desperately after a fractional pause, “so you’d expect ’er—well, to run around a bit, wouldn’t you?”

  “She was going to have a baby.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Miss Bryant in a very small voice. “She did tell me that… Almost”—her eyes were the eyes of a hurt child—“almost proud of it, she seemed.” She glanced at Fen, who nodded.

  “Very cool and worldly about it, I expect,” he commented. “And were you impressed?”

  “No, sir, I wasn’t. I—I thought it was awful.” Again tormented by the sense of her disloyalty, Valerie Bryant lowered her mascara-coated eyelashes; but when she looked up again it was to repeat, more loudly and clearly than before:

  “I thought it was beastly.”

  “And I didn’t put it in quite the right words, did I?” said Humbleby. “She wasn’t going to have the baby. She was going to get rid of it before it was born.”

  “Yes, sir.” And now, as if some perplexing issue were at last resolved, Valerie Bryant’s manner was resolute. “She was going to ’ave an abortion. She wouldn’t ’a’ bin able to take that part in the ’istorical picture else.”

  “Quite so. Who was the father?”

  “She didn’t tell me that, sir. Just ’inted it was someone important.” Again the glance towards Fen, signalling disenchantment and the willingness to face it squarely; in response to it he sympathetically smiled. “But of course I ‘ad me suspicions.”

  “Of whom?”

  She looked apprehensively about her, and Humbleby, interpreting the movement, said:

  “Don’t worry. What you say won’t go any farther.”

  “Well, sir, in that case… I thought it must ’a’ bin either Mr. North—that’s Stuart North, the star—or Mr. Maurice Crane.”

  “Yes, that fits in with what we know already. Where was Gloria Scott last Christmas?”

  “Was that when it appened, sir? She was staying with the Cranes, so I s’pose—”

  “Yes. Anyway, we’ll look into it. Miss Scott didn’t, I suppose, give you the impression that she was likely to get married?”

  “Because of the baby, sir?”

  “Not necessarily. Anytime—for any reason—to anyone.”

  “Well, she did use to just ’int now and again that there was someone as was really seriously interested in ’er, but that may ’a’ bin only talk. I don’t know, I’m sure, sir.”

  “Can you think of any reason why she should have killed herself?”

  Valerie Bryant reflected long and earnestly. “No, sir,” she said at last. “I can’t—honestly I can’t.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “It was the day before yesterday, sir. She dropped in to ’ave lunch at the canteen.”

  “And did she seem quite normal?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Very cheerful she was. Though I…”

  “Yes?”

  “I—I got the notion she wouldn’t be wanting to see so much of me in the future.” Valerie moved her golden-brown shoulders unhappily. “Of course, she ’ad ’er way to make, so it wasn’t surprising, not reelly.”

  “In my official capacity,” said Humbleby dispassionately, “I’m not supposed to make comments. But I don’t mind telling you that this girl sounds to me like a bitch of the first water… Did she say what she expected to be doing that evening?”

  “Yes, sir, she did.”

  “Ah.” Humbleby abandoned contumely and became business-like. “What, then?”

  “She’d been invited to a party, sir. At Mr. Nicholas Crane’s flat.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” In the intensity of his satisfaction Humbleby positively snorted. “And after that you didn’t see her again?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Right.” Humbleby snapped his notebook shut and imprisoned it in a large rubber band. “Oh just a couple more questions. Where did Gloria Scott live?”

  “In Kensington, sir. Number 22, Renfrew Gardens… Oh, but”—Valerie remembered something—“she was going to move, I don’t know where to…”

  “That’s all right; we do. And the other question is this: Where was she, and what was she doing, before she started to work here a year ago?”

  “Oh, that’s easy, sir. She was acting in a repertory theatre at Menenford.”

  “Good.” Humbleby stood up. “Then that’s all, I think. For the time being, don’t say anything to anybody about this, please.”

  Valerie, too, got to her feet. “No, sir, I won’t. I—I—Could you please tell me ’ow it ’appened, sir?”

  “Certainly,” said Humbleby, and briefly complied. She listened apathetically—too dazed, perhaps, by the central fact to assimilate much of the detail.

  “And the funeral, sir?” she asked when he had finished. “I should like to go to that.”

  “It depends on what we’re able to find out about her family,” Humbleby explained. “But one way or another I’ll try to let you know when it’s to be… And now we must go, and you must get back to your work.”

  She moved to the door, which Fen opened for her. The business man’s dream, he reflected: it was not difficult to predict, in general outline, what would become of her… She paused for a second and smiled diffidently at him; then, quickening her steps, went away down the passage, her shoulders trembling a little as she wept… So one person, at least, unfeignedly mourned for Gloria Scott.

  Fen and Humbleby stood irresolute as they watched her go.

  “You ought to set up as a psychiatrist,” said Humbleby sardonically. “Spécialité de la maison, the sublimating of unhealthy adolescent crushes. You seem to be a great deal more serious than I remembered.”

  Fen’s brown hair, ineffectually plastered down with water, stood up in disaffected spikes at the crown of his head; his lean, ruddy, clean-shaven face was thoughtful.

  “As I get older,” he explained, “I get less resilient and more predictable. It depresses me sometimes.” He sighed and looked at his watch. “Five to eleven. I must find my conference. What are your plans?”

  “Maurice and Nicholas Crane are my plans.”

  “I shall be seeing them, you know: they’re both involved in this film. Come along with me.”

  “Thanks, but I must telephone Charles first, and in any case I can’t very well disrupt your conference with my—um—inquisitions. How long will it last?”

  “Heaven knows. Not very long, I imagine, since Leiper isn’t going to be there.”

  “Well, will you tell Maurice and Nicholas that I want to see them as soon as it’s over?”

  Fen looked dubious. “I’ll tell them,” he said. “I’ll tell them all right. But people of that sort haven’t the instinct of obedience, even where the police are concerned, and they’ll probably drift away pretending to have forgotten about it. You’d better come yourself and try to put the fear of God into them.”

  “But surely they’d not be so irresponsible as to—”

  “The films are a religion,” Fen interrupted. “Even Government departments—Petroleum Boards, Tax Inspectors and so forth—kowtow to them to some extent. And that fact induces in the more important film people a sense of immunity—not altogether an illusory sense, either. If you want to talk to the brothers Crane you ought to tackle them about it in person.”

  To this proposition Humbleby, after some further argument, agreed, and they set off for room CC, discovering it, somewhat to their surprise, only a short distance away. Though larger, it bore a disheartening resemblance to the room they had just left. Its parquet flooring was coming apart, with the result that there were treacherous projecting edges on which people tripped. The green paint was peeling from its radiators. Someone—possibly reacting after the manner of Mar
tin Luther to an apparition of the Devil—had apparently hurled a bottle of ink at the wall. A table at the centre was provisioned, as for a board meeting, with ash-trays, scribbling paper and inkpots, and had chairs of padded red leather and chromium tubing set about it. There were, however, two more or less humane influences present—one of them a framed photograph of the 1937 Studio Hockey Team, and the other a trolley with rubber wheels which contained cups of steaming coffee.

  To this Fen addressed himself immediately on arrival—having previously, however, identified for Humbleby the brothers Crane. No official proceedings, he noted, had as yet begun. The company stood about sipping coffee and talking desultorily—a various assembly representing, as Fen knew, the personal enthusiasms, in a number of different spheres, of Giles Leiper. For the most part they were not people who in the ordinary way would have elected to work together, but in the present instance circumstances had been altogether too strong for them, and they had achieved a compromise solution of their social problem by coagulating into uneasy cliques. The atmosphere was not improved by the fact that at least half of them could be of no possible service on such an occasion as this, and were there only because Giles Leiper, who conceived films to be Corporate Works of Art, had insisted that all of the artists chiefly concerned should contribute to the planning of this one. Leiper was not—as Stuart North had prognosticated—himself present, but his influence impended over the gathering like a malediction in a fairytale, and an aura of gloom inevitably resulted… But perhaps (Fen told himself) the mood of this particular conference—its mistrustful mutterings and its air of obscure apprehension—had some more potent and immediate cause than the whims of Leiper; persons eminent in the film industry do not, in pursuing their avocations, commonly exhibit any very marked symptoms of gaiety—but at the moment the sullenness of such of them as were present seemed extreme, and it was reasonable to suppose that there lay behind it some undivulged issue of a gravity sufficient to enhance even a melancholy so pervasive as that engendered by The Unfortunate Lady: the death, perhaps, of Gloria Scott… Out of the corner of his eye Fen watched Maurice and Nicholas Crane while Humbleby spoke to them, and received the impression that both of them were discomposed by his request for an interview—and more specially (which was odd) Nicholas…