Frequent Hearses

by Edmund Crispin

  “So you still have no notion, Inspector,” said Eleanor Crane, “as to who killed Maurice?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Crane. We’re doing everything that can be done.”

  “Vengeance.” Almost imperceptibly she shivered. “Is that your theory about the motive?”

  “It’s an idea I’m keeping in mind,” said Humbleby reservedly as he sat down again.

  Eleanor Crane laughed, suddenly and harshly, but not without amusement.

  “Another,” she said, “being that I get control of Maurice’s money. You knew that, didn’t you? Yes, of course you did. I told that pleasant young man you sent here on Saturday afternoon.”

  Humbleby remained impassive and said nothing. But:

  “Oh, l-look here, m-mother, that’s absurd,” said David Crane. “It’s s-silly to put ideas into p-people’s heads. I know you n-never p-pay any attention to what I say, b-but…”

  “David dear, your loyalty does you credit but not, I’m afraid, your intelligence… And I may as well admit, Inspector, that I need that money. I’ve had heavy losses recently on the tracks, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever be able to meet my obligations.”

  “Indeed, ma’am.” The investigations of his subordinates had made Humbleby acquainted with this fact twenty-four hours ago, and the admission did not interest him. What did interest him was the presence here of Aubrey Medesco, and he went on to say casually: “I was a little surprised to find this gentleman with you.”

  “There is absolutely no limit,” said Medesco, “to the things that surprise the police. Their capacity for amazement makes Candide look like the most degenerate of urban sophisticates.”

  “Mr. Medesco,” said Eleanor pleasantly, “is an old friend of the family, Inspector.”

  “W-well, n-not an old friend, m-mother.” David seemed anxious to be helpful. “B-because when I c-came back from the U.S.A. t-two years ago we didn’t know him, and I remember w-when you said you w-were going to m-marry him I s-said to m-myself…”

  “David!” said Eleanor in good-humoured exasperation. “I thought I told you that my engagement to Mr. Medesco was to remain a secret for the present.”

  “Oh; s-sorry, m-mother. I only thought…”

  “No, dear. You only failed to think.” There was a hint of real annoyance underlying Eleanor Crane’s tolerant smile. “Well, that’s one cat out of the bag, Inspector.”

  “My congratulations, sir,” said Humbleby gravely. “And to you, ma’am, every happiness.” He was not surprised that they had wanted to keep the engagement a secret, for a mariage de convenance is always apt to arouse the world’s scorn, and particularly if it is between elderly people; but he was also not surprised that in this instance it had been arranged, since he had sensed from the first—little though they had spoken to one another—a very definite sympathy between Medesco and Mrs. Crane. Whether this posture of affairs would prove to have any importance in the case he did not know; there was the point, of course, that—

  And Mrs. Crane caught up his train of thought at precisely the stage where she interrupted it.

  “So there is the point,” she said, “that Aubrey, too, had a motive for killing Maurice—since presumably he would prefer to marry a wife who was not impecunious.”

  Medesco looked up at her, and it was the first time Humbleby had seen him smile.

  “My dear girl,” he said, “I’d marry you if you were a barmaid.”

  Eleanor Crane had crossed to the table on which the sherry decanter stood, and was refilling her glass. “Apposite,” she commented. “Perfect timing. Are you sure you won’t have a drink, Inspector? If you don’t like sherry our insufferable butler could be made to produce something else. Or is it a regulation that you mustn’t drink when you’re on duty?”

  Having assured her that no such regulation existed, Humbleby accepted sherry and pledged her very courteously in it.

  “And now,” she said, “we’ve been holding you up for too long with chatter about our personal affairs. Tell us why you came.”

  “To investigate in detail, I’m afraid, this whole affair of Miss Scott’s contract.” Humbleby turned to Nicholas. “If you’d prefer to talk about it in private, sir…”

  “No, no,” said Nicholas wearily. “We may as well drag the whole squalid business out into the open, and be done with it.”

  At this, Mr. Cloud became vastly agitated.

  “I have to advise you, Mr. Crane,” he said perturbedly, “that you are not under any obligation to answer the Inspector’s questions. And indeed, in your own interests—”

  “Hush, Cloud.” Nicholas wagged a finger at him. “I appreciate your efforts, but they’re misplaced. Your job is to protect me from the Press… And by the way, where is the Press? They’re being remarkably discreet. I expected hordes of reporters, and not a single one has turned up so far—though they have rung me up to ask for a statement.”

  “They are obliged to go carefully,” said Mr. Cloud. “The situation is delicate, and they are obliged to go very, very carefully indeed. We might take a hint from them, eh, Mr. Crane?”

  Nicholas groaned. “Sit down, Cloud,” he said. “Stop fidgeting about. Drink your sherry.”

  “Very well, sir.” Mr. Cloud was clearly offended. “But if you will not be ruled by me I can take no responsibility, none whatever.” He sat down heavily and mopped his brow. “Please understand that this statement is not made with my approval.”

  “Mea maxima culpa,” said Nicholas. “You shall have a signed exoneration, Cloud, signed and witnessed… And now, Inspector, let’s get on with it.”

  An expectant silence fell upon the group. Eleanor Crane had her shoulder against the mantelpiece, and was staring absently at the Veronese in the corner. Medesco remained immobile, his small eyes almost closed. Mr. Cloud, deflated, sipped his sherry as though it were unspeakably distasteful to him. And only David Crane seemed unaffected by the atmosphere: he had picked up an illustrated magazine and was turning its pages attentively, as if, cat-like, he had for the time being completely forgotten what was going forward.

  “I’m sorry to have to probe this matter, sir,” said Humbleby. “But for one thing, it’s obviously bound up with Miss Scott’s suicide, and for another, there’s Mr. Maurice Crane’s death to consider. You see—”

  “Yes, yes, Inspector,” Nicholas interrupted. “There’s no need to apologise. I don’t suspect you of having come down here out of mere idle curiosity.” He paused to light a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and went on:

  “This is what happened.

  “Madge was at the bottom of it all—I don’t say that to excuse myself, but the fact remains that she was the prime mover. She hated poor Gloria; and the reason for that, of course, was Stuart North.

  “Stuart and Gloria were both in Visa for Heaven, which I directed. Gloria only had a tiny part, but her scene in the film involved Stuart as well, and that was how they met. Stuart fell for her, in a mild way. I don’t know whether she was genuinely interested in him, but anyway, it flattered her to be touted about by a star.”

  “Yes, and that raises a point I don’t quite understand,” said Eleanor Crane. “What on earth made her go after Maurice as well? Did she seriously imagine she could run both of them simultaneously?”

  “Well, I don’t know, but I’ve an idea she left Stuart for Maurice as soon as she found out how much Stuart detested films. Specifically a film career was what she was after, and from that point of view Maurice was a more promising ally than Stuart, who wanted to get away from films as soon as he possibly could. But where all that’s concerned your guess is as good as mine.

  “We finished Visa for Heaven at the end of November, and it was about then that Stuart met Madge for the first time. I don’t pretend to be able to interpret my precious sister’s motives, but anyway, she made a dead set at Stuart. And unluckily for her, Gloria had got in first.

  “That, no doubt, made her keener than ever. She’s got a nice technique of persu
asion, has Madge. You see, apart from Leiper himself, she’s easily the most important person at the studios, and no one who doesn’t want to risk losing his job dares offend her. Even Leiper has to handle her carefully, because she’s a fabulous money-maker, and if he lost her to Rank or Korda his profits’d drop like an express lift.

  “But the trouble about Stuart, from her point of view, was that she couldn’t put this technique into action against him, for the simple reason that he’d much rather be on the stage than in films. So if Madge wanted him for an inamorato, she’d have to rely on her unaided charms. And with Gloria about, they didn’t seem to work very well.”

  Outside the two high windows that flanked the fireplace it was almost completely dark, and the rising wind blew a spatter of raindrops against the panes. The huge room—surely, in origin, a ballroom—was dimly lighted; only round the fire was there a circle of greater radiance, and this waxed and waned perceptibly with the pulse of the engine that supplied it. The fire was burning low, and Nicholas got up to throw another log on to it before going on.

  “Well, that was the situation,” he said. “Until The Unfortunate Lady, my sweet sister couldn’t do anything nasty to Gloria, for the simple reason that Gloria didn’t have a job. Then the question of casting Martha Blount came up, and I recommended Gloria for the part. Jocelyn—Jocelyn Stafford, that is—is a bit other-worldly where studio scandal is concerned; he had no idea there was any antagonism between Madge and Gloria, and I didn’t go out of my way to tell him. So he interviewed the girl and signed her up. I thought that when Madge heard about it she’d just resign herself to making the best of a bad job. I was wrong. I honestly hadn’t a notion how much she loathed Gloria. If I had had, I certainly wouldn’t have suggested Gloria for that part. She deserved to get it, mind you—but my encouragement of young actresses normally stops short if it seems likely to create a first-class, flaming row.

  “And that’s just what it did create. When Madge heard what had happened, she cornered me and issued an ultimatum. If Gloria’s contract wasn’t revoked, she said, she’d go to Leiper and tell him that if I didn’t leave his organisation she would. And we, were both well aware which of us he’d choose to keep. I wasn’t signed up for anything after The Unfortunate Lady, and if I’d ignored Madge’s orders I should have been out on my neck.”

  “My dear boy,” said his mother, “surely with your reputation, rank—”

  But Nicholas shook his head.

  “Unlikely,” he interrupted. “The industry’s at a low ebb at the moment, and the other companies have got many more directors on tap than they can use. I’d quite definitely have been out of a job—and that possibility didn’t please me a bit.”

  He looked at them wryly.

  “Cowardice, you think? Yes, I admit it was. But I couldn’t possibly have foreseen that Gloria would kill herself, could I? And I swear to you”—he leaned forward and spoke very earnestly—“I swear to you that I meant to make it up to Gloria afterwards in some way Madge couldn’t interfere with.

  “The plan was Madge’s. Even for her sake Leiper probably wouldn’t have gone back on that contract once it was signed—and in any case, she wasn’t at all anxious to have it known that she was doing Gloria down. The basic idea, of course, was to leave the dirty work to me. And the circumstances were all in favour. Marcia Bloom was playing the lead in Lover’s Luck. Her father had died, and she wanted to go to Ireland for the funeral, and that meant a stand-in for last Tuesday evening’s performance, and just as it happened, her understudy had been taken off to hospital with appendicitis or something. And Jedd—Lover’s Luck is his show—is a man I know fairly well. It all fitted very nicely.

  “You know what the idea was. People who have contracts with a film company have to have permission from the company to appear on the stage or the radio. It’s nearly always given, so really the thing’s little more than a formality. Still, if you don’t observe that formality you’ve broken your contract, and you’re capable of being sued.

  “In their own interests theatrical managers generally see to it that that permission has been given.” Here Nicholas grew perceptibly uneasy. “But as Jedd knew me, he was prepared to take my word for it and didn’t ask for any other evidence.”

  “In your letter,” Humbleby interposed mildly, “there is a sentence which suggests that—”

  “Mr. Crane!” Cloud, who had been following the narrative with an air of hypnotised gloom, now sat upright so abruptly that he upset his sherry on to his knee. “It would be undesirable for us to enter into detail at this point. Very, very undesirable. We don’t want to give the Inspector the idea that we’re an accessory after a fact, do we now? We don’t want—”

  “Calm yourself, Cloud,” said Nicholas. “And wipe your trousers. There’s no question of my being an accessory after a fact. Where Jedd’s concerned, there isn’t a fact. To my knowledge, he’s never done anything in the least criminal.”

  “Then,” Humbleby prompted, “the reason why you assured Miss Crane that he would not give the—um—conspiracy away was—”

  “Was to do with his private life. A matter of marital infidelity.”

  Cloud gave vent to a loud moan. “Mr. Crane, Mr. Crane! We must not lay ourselves open to any imputation of blackmail. We must not—”

  “Once and for all, Cloud,” said Nicholas in exasperation, “will you be quiet… I merely told Jedd that I should like Gloria to have the opportunity of standing in for Marcia Bloom, and after he’d talked to her he agreed to give her the chance.”

  Eleanor Crane raised her eyebrows.

  “Theatrical managers,” she observed dryly, “are obviously more trusting nowadays than they used to be.”

  Her son brushed this sarcasm peremptorily aside. “None the less, that is what happened. And you’ll understand that Gloria herself wasn’t at all averse to the idea when I put it up to her… I was contemptible enough,” said Nicholas steadily, “to tell her she’d be doing me a favour by standing in for Marcia; and God help me, she was very anxious to do me any favour she could…

  “Well, it was all arranged. I told Gloria—not in front of witnesses—that I’d see to getting the company’s permission for her to appear, that she could leave all that side of it to me. Of course she trusted me.” Nicholas gave a short, toneless laugh. “Why shouldn’t she? I liked her and I’d always done what I could for her.”

  Eleanor Crane made a movement of impatience.

  “These self-tormentings may be all very well, Nicholas,” she said, “but a public exhibition of them strikes me as being in poorish taste. You’ve assured us several times how badly you feel about it all, and we quite believe you. So for the moment just confine yourself to the facts.”

  Nicholas looked at her queerly.

  “Very well, mother,” he answered in a dull, uninflected voice. “I’ll confine myself to the facts…

  “The next fact is that Gloria slaved for four days to get the part up. I’m told she was very good in it, though I didn’t see her myself.

  “And then, of course, I had to tell her what she’d let herself in for.

  “That was really why I asked her to my party. When everyone else had gone, I kept her behind to talk to her.

  “There’s no need to tell you in detail what I said. I should have liked to have put the blame on Madge, but I didn’t dare. And anyway, by that time I was quite as culpable as she was.

  “But the really horrible thing is that what I said to Gloria was almost pure bluff. It wasn’t that she’d been tricked into an impossible position; it was that I deceived her into imagining she had. In other words, I was trading on her relative ignorance of film business. My line, you see, was that she’d broken her contract by appearing in Lover’s Luck; and that if she didn’t want to be sued for breach she’d better let me arrange for the contract to be cancelled—a thing I could quite easily do. But the point is that if she’d just dug her heels in and said ‘Let them sue’, I was foxed, because I knew damn well
how unlikely it was that they would.”

  Grimacing, Medesco threw the butt of his cigar into the fire.

  “And she realised, no doubt,” he observed, “that if she fought your obvious intention of gerrymandering her out of her contract, you’d see to it that she never got another. So whether she believed you or whether she thought you were bluffing, it all came to the same thing from her point of view: she was finished in films.”

  “Oh, God, I hadn’t thought of that.” Nicholas closed his eyes and with his thumb and forefinger massaged their lids, like a man in the last stages of physical exhaustion. “Well, anyway, you know how it worked out,” he went on after a moment’s pause. “I—I knew she’d be upset, naturally. But I never dreamed she’d take it as badly as she did. Her reaction was so violent and horrible that I could scarcely believe she wasn’t just acting. But her face went grey, it looked pinched and frightful, and you can’t act that sort of thing. When I’d finished she didn’t say anything—anything at all. She just turned and ran out of the flat.

  “And then…

  “Well, then she went away and killed herself.”

  For a long half-minute there was complete silence.

  Nicholas’ final words had sounded thin and bloodless in that huge room, and the shadows which on three sides beleaguered the group by the fire seemed now to be darker and more pervasive. Draughts fingered the worn tapestries on the walls, and the effect of the ebb and flow of the light had become mesmeric. You could hear that now it was raining in real earnest; though you could not see it, because the window-panes were as dull and black as if they had been coated with creosote. The balustrade of the mezzanine gallery was ghostly in the upper darkness.

  And the drowned girl, it seemed to Humbleby, stood among them as vividly as an actual phantom. Except perhaps for David, everyone there had her in his mind’s eye. A tag from Voltaire drifted irrelevantly into Humbleby’s mind: “Make love like fools when you are young, and, work like devils when you are old: it is the only way to live”. And that, it occurred to him, enabled one to diagnose accurately enough what had been the defect in Gloria Scott: while still in her teens she had been an uncompromising arriviste, and about such a figure there is something inevitably pathetic and incongruous. First and foremost the young should always concern themselves simply with living, with experiencing. Let them be ambitious, yes; but what is precious—Humbleby had a sentimental liking for this poem of Spender’s which Fen might not have approved—what is precious is never to forget the delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth. And arrivisme is always and everywhere a denial of that…