Sequel to Murder: The Cases of Arthur Crook and Other Mysteries

by Anthony Gilbert

  Everything was in readiness. We had got the premises, we were living in The Cottage, we could commute by car each day. We hadn’t actually signed the agreements, but everything was waiting—when down came Caro, like that ill-fated crow, black as a tar barrel, to toss not just a spanner but a bomb into the works.

  When I came back from walking in the woods that afternoon and saw her car at the door—she was the only possessor of a Silver Cloud we were ever likely to have visit us—I wondered what on earth she wanted. It never occurred to me it might be just a social call. Provincial schoolmarms were never Caro’s cup of tea. As I opened the door Van called out, “Ursie, see if the kettle’s boiling and bring the brandy. We’ve got trouble on our hands.”

  When I came in, carrying the Dom-Remy, Caro was hunched by the fire, like some small bird, plumage draggled, colors quenched—but never a sparrow or a wren; a hummingbird, say, still special, still unforgettable. She looked right through me—I was never anything but that oddball Ursula Jordan whom Vanessa had inexplicably collected.

  I filled a glass with brandy and Vanessa put it in Caro’s hand. The look Van turned on the girl was something I’d never seen before—full of pity and tenderness, such as she had never turned on me. My own heart burned—but not for Caro.

  “What’s happened to Caro?” I said, trying to speak lightly. And Van said, “She’s being blackmailed.”

  * * *

  Blackmail is something you find in books and films or read about in the newspapers, something that affects other people, never anything that touches your own life. And that Caro Wellsley, the pampered and indulged wife of a well-known and wealthy man, should be as open to such an indignity as any penny-plain sinner—somehow it seemed absurd.

  “Who’s blackmailing her?” I asked, when the silence had gone on for a long time.

  And Caro spoke the name they’ll find engraved on my heart when I die. “Ethel Ridgley.”

  The name had a sordid sound and the story was the mixture as before. Mrs. Ridgley—anyway, that’s what she called herself—was owner or part proprietor of a sleazy kind of hotel, called The Penthouse, in a sleazy south-coast resort. And here for the past year the exquisite, the fêted, the immensely publicized Lady Wellsley, had been meeting her lover.

  The more you have the more you want, my mother used to say. You might think that a rich husband, a four-and-a-half-thousand-pound car, mink and diamonds, and the sort of life you associate with princesses in fairy tales, to say nothing of a child (to do her justice I think Isobel was the only person Caro was capable of loving as much as she loved herself) would be enough for one woman; but no—“I had to have someone,” Caro insisted. You can’t imagine what it’s like living with Miles. It’s always cold.” She actually shivered, and that wasn’t acting.

  I never saw Rupert Brook in the flesh, though I did see a picture of him later. He was one of those romantic, unsatisfactory, rather lupine young men who seem to appeal to women. Not that I think he called out much maternal instinct in Caro; but he was young, younger than she, and, as subsequent events proved, was mad about her, and I mean that in a literal sense.

  “It was the contrast with Miles that appealed to her,” Vanessa explained later. “If all she wanted was worldly success and approval she had all that. But if nothing succeeds like success, nothing sickens like it, either.”

  Whatever Rupert Brook was, he certainly wasn’t successful, except in his conquest of Caro. If everything Miles touched turned to gold, whatever that young man laid his hand on turned to ashes. Yet I did believe Caro when she said that at first he transformed her world. “I’d forgotten what it was like to be a human being,” she told Vanessa.

  Perhaps they got careless or, more likely, after a time she began to tire. Anyhow, within twelve months, she was trying to break off the relationship. “I began to think that Miles suspected something,” she told us. “Once I thought I was being followed; perhaps I was wrong, but I couldn’t take the chance. If ever he had proof, Miles would have separated me from Isobel, and I couldn’t risk losing her for a dozen Rupert Brooks.”

  I think she expected young Brook to come to heel at her bidding. He’d been dancing to her piping, but now the music was over, and she wanted out. And that’s when the trouble began. Because he wouldn’t take his dismissal easily.

  I wondered once if he might be in the blackmail plot, but Caro shook her head. Nevertheless he began to be a serious threat. “He rang up Miles’s house,” she said. “I was on tenterhooks in case Miles or his secretary should answer.” He wrote—they had arranged an accommodation address for his letters (I saw Vanessa wince at that, Caro creeping down like any adulterous slut to collect her mail)—saying he would come to London unless she’d come to see him at least one more time. So in the end she promised to go.

  “He was impossible, Vanessa. He wanted me to leave Miles and set up house with him. It was like trying to talk sense to a child. He hadn’t a job, he was in debt at the hotel, and what were we to live on?”

  It was characteristic of Miles that though his wife might appear to revel in luxury there was probably no time during her married life when she could have laid hands on fifty pounds without her husband knowing. And he was as avid about the keeping of accounts as any suburban husband.

  “He said if I didn’t come to see him he’d kill himself,” Caro went on. “How was I to know he meant it? Don’t they say the ones who always threaten to make a hole in the water never do?”

  Only that was just what Brook had done—not a hole in the water, but a massive dose of sleeping pills. Where did he get them, Vanessa wanted to know; but Caro said you could always get that sort of thing if you knew your way around. His landlady—this same Ethel Ridgley—found him when she took up his breakfast, and she was hours too late to be able to help. She phoned the doctor, the doctor called the police. The cause of death was obvious, the motive scarcely less so. A young man in poor circumstances, no job, no friends—it was a story you could read in the paper any day of the week.

  Mrs. Ridgley said he hadn’t left a note, perhaps he hadn’t realized what he was doing. Naturally she’d say that, Caro agreed; it doesn’t do even her kind of hotel any good to have the publicity of suicide. Still, “suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed” was the verdict. It was a pinchpenny funeral—he seemed to have no one but a married sister up north, and she couldn’t get away.

  “I didn’t even know about it,” Caro said. “It wouldn’t make the London press and I didn’t see the local paper. I did think it was too good to be true that he wouldn’t make any more trouble. And then this Ethel Ridgley came to the surface.”

  True to type, and to our experience with her later, Ethel Ridgley never put anything in writing. She telephoned Caro’s London address, identified herself, and said she had a document she would like to discuss. She had given evidence at the inquest that the dead man had left no message, no letter of any kind, but it turned out not to be true. On the contrary, he had left the sort of letter that would delight the heart of any Sunday tabloid editor, leaving no doubt at all in the reader’s mind as to the identity of the woman concerned.

  “And she’s blackmailing you on that?” I cried. “But surely you can see she’s burned her boats by telling the police that no letter existed? How can she come forward now?”

  “Quite easily,” Vanessa said. “She can say she found the letter later—

  behind a dressing table. Only I don’t think she has the police in mind.”

  “Of course she hasn’t the police in mind,” Caro said. “She’s giving me first refusal, and if I won’t—or can’t—pay her price, she’ll take it to Miles.”

  “Does she suppose he’d submit to blackmail?”

  “She knows he won’t have to. Vanessa, he must never see that letter! Rupert used to write to me, and I destroyed his letters as soon as I’d read them. I never wrote to him, it was too dangerous. If Miles should get this letter he’d take Isobel away from me forever and I don’
t care what people say about the law giving the child to the mother, he’d override it. And if he does that I’ll kill myself, I swear I will!”

  “What’s she asking for the letter?” I inquired.

  And Caro told us, “Two thousand pounds.”

  * * *

  “Where does that niece of yours imagine we can raise two thousand pounds?” I demanded of Vanessa when Caro, reassured and now once more as cool as silk, had driven away. “Simple to say not to worry, it’ll be all right, but surely she knows every penny of our savings and every penny of your legacy are tied up in this new venture.”

  “Fortunately the ends aren’t quite tied,” Vanessa said.

  I didn’t believe it at first—that she would pitch our future over her shoulder as though it were no more than a pinch of salt; but to her it wasn’t even a problem. She didn’t go through the motions of consulting me, of explaining or pleading; it was as natural a solution to her as her next breath.

  “You can’t do it,” I protested. “We can’t go back to those slave jobs.”

  “It’s Caro’s life—literally, her life. For us it’s no more than a change of plan.”

  Even then I cherished a hope that we could call Ethel Ridgley’s bluff.

  She’d take a tithe of her demand, we could still cling to our enterprise—but not after I saw her. She was a shabby little peacock of a woman, so much in command of the situation she didn’t even have to preen her moth-eaten plumage. I saw my proud Vanessa accept her conditions without protest—and if a bomb had fallen and destroyed us all I’d have had no regrets.

  “I suppose you know you haven’t only given away our present, you’ve mortgaged our future,” I cried bitterly when the woman had taken herself off.

  “Sufficient unto the day,” murmured Vanessa, she who was the sworn enemy of clichés. It showed how far she had fallen. As for Caro, she didn’t appear to think there was anything generous about the gesture. “I knew I could count on you,” she told Vanessa. She was back safe in her kingdom, and what was it to her who was without?

  I was right about the future, though. About a year later Miles was killed in a car crash, and in his will he had left an immense fortune tied up for his daughter, while Caro could only enjoy the interest; so my first frantic hopes of a repayment were dashed at birth. He also added a very curious codicil which would virtually make Isobel a ward of court if it could be shown that Caro had behaved in a manner that made her an unsuitable guardian for the girl. And that was Ethel’s second opportunity.

  She appeared as punctually as the morning tea in a well-run household. She had found in one of the street-photographer booths at Marlston a casual snapshot taken the previous year; it showed Caro in the company of a strange dark young man, with a Valentino profile. It must have been snapped in the street, but even a spinster withering on the virgin thorn, which was doubtless how Caro thought of me, could have seen they were lovers.

  The production of this photograph in the right quarter could do a lot of harm, she pointed out blandly, adding in a casual manner that she was compelled to make use of this opportunity because of debts her hotel had incurred. The previous summer had been a bad season, there were extensive accounts to be met. This time the demand was smaller, but it involved a mortgage on The Cottage, where we were still living.

  We hadn’t gone back to teaching—some puritan streak in Vanessa made her decree that women who allowed themselves to compromise with a blackmailer weren’t fit to supervise the education of the young. I thought a lot of the young could have given us lessons in compromise and put rings around us. We weren’t exactly penniless. Vanessa did free-lance work, I taught three days a week in someone else’s language school that was a travesty of the one we had planned, and gave lessons by correspondence. And we lived like two ladybirds in an isolation as immense as the Gobi Desert.

  “We don’t have to pay,” I insisted, but I knew we would. At least this time I wouldn’t allow Van to become personally involved. We got the money together in bundles of old banknotes, packed them into a lingerie box, and I met Ethel in the lounge of the Paddington Court Hotel. This was like every railway hotel lounge—hosts of small tables occupied by women who looked as if they had been there for a year and would still be there in the same places if one arrived twelve months later; lost anonymous women for the most part, waiting for trains that never arrived and passengers who had never set out on their journey.

  Ethel came in, the same faded scornful woman she had been at our last meeting. When she walked out, with that absurd parcel swinging on her arm, she said, “I won’t say goodbye, Miss Jordan. I have a feeling we may meet again.”

  Out of the room she flounced and onto the station platform. I sat sick and blind with fury and watched her go.

  Ten minutes later she was dead—had slipped and fallen in the afternoon commuter crowd, they said, and no one quite certain how it had happened. The mysterious thing was that the parcel containing the money was never found.

  * * *

  Behind me in the quiet room a door opened and closed as Vanessa slipped back to her place at the fireside. I waited a minute for her to tell me her caller’s name, but she said nothing.

  “That was a long call,” I suggested, when I couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “Was it Caro, after all?” Because Caro had fallen on her feet once more. Everyone had expected her to remarry, and she had confided to us that she was shortly going to announce her engagement to Charles Marshall, another tycoon, but of a very different stamp from her first husband. “This time it’s love,” Vanessa had said. As if that made everything worthwhile. “Not a word till Charles is back from his mission,” Caro had warned us. “But I had to tell you.”

  “No,” said Vanessa now in reply to my question. “It wasn’t Caro. That was Ethel Ridgley on the line.”

  I turned sharply. “Think what you’re saying,” I implored her. She was sitting beside the fire like a little Chinese goddess veiled in thorns. “How could it be Ethel? Unless you’re going to tell me someone else was buried in her stead a year ago.”

  But that wasn’t possible. I’d seen the woman myself, lying between the rails, with the crowd milling, and the authorities holding the people back, and the ambulance bell sounding from the frosty street. Someone had covered her, and questions were being asked and answered all around.

  “Don’t ask me,” I had said to someone shoving up against me and babbling with inhuman excitement. “I came down to get my train and I saw the crowd ...”

  “Oh, no, she was buried all right,” Vanessa agreed, “and of course it wasn’t actually Ethel on the telephone. But some people are like the phoenix, that mythical bird that rises from its own ashes. It doesn’t always have to assume the identical shape.”

  “What shape is it assuming today?” I asked.

  “A man calling himself Jackson, who says he’s her brother, and has something he thinks might interest us. Did she ever speak of a brother, Ursula?”

  “She never spoke of anyone,” I said. “She might have been Topsy who just growed.”

  I had been convinced from that first occasion that blackmail was no new game to her—she knew all the rules. Everything had been conducted personally, over the telephone or face to face. We had no signature, no correspondence, no postmarked envelope, nothing. She could have declared complete ignorance and we couldn’t have disproved her.

  “He says he was in Canada at the time of her death, and as he was next of kin the information was sent to the last address they found in her book

  for him. He’d left by then, and it took months for the news to catch up with him.” Even then he hadn’t come straight home. “He says he couldn’t afford the fare,” Vanessa explained.

  Her voice sounded like the voice of a dead person rising from the tomb.

  On impulse I leaned forward and switched on her reading lamp. During the few minutes that had elapsed since the phone began to ring and her return to the room, she had changed more than during the pa
st twelve months. It wasn’t so much a pinching of features—she could never be anything less than beautiful; but something was missing. Hitherto she might have been disappointed of her hope, but the hope wasn’t dead. Now it was as if some essential faith in the integrity of a justice she couldn’t explain or even comprehend had died. She looked less outraged than betrayed.

  “And is it his idea that we shall pay his fare back to Canada?” I murmured.

  I laid my hand on hers, which was as cold as snow.

  “Oh, I think he’ll want more than that,” she told me. “But you’ll be able to ask him when he comes. He’s due in about thirty minutes; he only telephoned to make certain we should be here.”

  “I warned you,” I told her, turning back to the window. At some moment unnoticed, while we were waiting, the evening star had risen. I thought of a world where people lay down in innocence and rose in hope. I wondered if we’d ever find ourselves in that world again.

  “What is it this time? Another photograph?”

  “A diary, found among Ethel’s papers and put aside for the next of kin, if one ever turned up. He’s bringing it with him.”

  When the front doorbell rang Vanessa wouldn’t let me admit the man alone.

  “We’ll go together,” she said. “Union is strength.”

  The hall floated in shadow, but as I drew back the latch Van pressed the button of the chandelier and we were immersed in a silver flood. When one thinks of blackmailers, one imagines shabby little men with ragged mustaches, and wearing belted raincoats; but there was nothing shabby or apologetic or even openly threatening about our visitor. He blinked for an instant in the unexpected brilliance, then came charging past me, as though I wasn’t even there, and went up to Vanessa.

  “I hope I haven’t spoiled your evening,” he said, offering a hand she preferred not to notice. “But you know the old saying, If ’twere done ’twere well ’twere done quickly.”