A Murder in Mayfair (20 page)

“That shouldn't be too difficult.”

“The other couple are the Hayden-Gryces.”

“I always love names like that. It makes everything so much easier.”

“Also London University in the early sixties. He a professor of History, she a lecturer in Art. Frere's memory is that he died in the late seventies.”

“Right. Got that. And what's the connection?”

“They adopted my twin.”

“What?”

“That's right. We were two. I've learned a lot since we spoke last. Come round when you've got the info and I'll bring you up to date.”

That was Monday. She rang me on the Wednesday evening. No slouch, Susan. She said she wanted to talk to me, but not in my flat.

“Why? Scared of the seducer's couch?”

“No, because I'd like to see you on a lunchtime at a little and pretty nasty pub in Peckham.”

“You make it sound so romantic. Tomorrow is a dead Thursday.”

Dead Thursday is one of those days when there is no important government business to be done and everyone drifts off for an early weekend in their constituency or with their wife or mistress.

“That sounds all right. I'll be home all morning. Just ring me and tell me when you'll be there. The pub is called the Cock and Pheasant, and it's in Potter Street. If you come in your official car, I'd have it wait in the car park just off the High Street and make your own way. A car like that would be noticed.”

I decided not to use the car, and had my A-Z in my briefcase, but as it turned out business caught up with me and, having phoned Susan and made a date for twelve-thirty, I found I had to use the car after all and brave my driver's disapproval of any
suburb less swish than Chelsea or Kensington. The fact that I got out before my destination and told him to wait in the car park only increased the chill. It was getting to feel as if I conducted my life under the chilly gaze of a minister of the Free Church of Scotland.

The pub was indeed seedy—cold, dirty, silent, and ill-patronized. I got myself a pint and went to sit with Susan, who had commandeered a distant corner and was sitting there apparently absorbed in that day's
Daily Mirror.
She was dressed scruffily, an option that was hardly open to me. I briefed her quickly on all I had learned since I'd seen her last. Her eyes were bright with interest.

“The plot thickens,” I commented with originality.

“Yes—it's becoming a rich, heady concoction.”

“Well, throw in your twopennyworth of spices.”

“Right. Well, let's take the Hayden-Gryces first. I did some research into his written work and found something that could even be marginally relevant to my own subject: a study of professional families in Lincolnshire towns in the latter part of the nineteenth century.”

“Fascinating.”

“Colin, don't play the tabloid vulgarian—it doesn't suit you. I know you have to suck up to the gutter press, but that doesn't mean you have to imitate it. Anyway, there was one Hayden-Gryce in the directory, living on the borders of Hampstead and Finchley, and I rang the number. An elderly woman's voice answered: high, intense, a very unrelaxing voice that rather sent my hackles up. She agreed she was the widow of Professor Harley Hayden-Gryce, and I rather incautiously said I thought I'd met her son some years ago.”

“Why incautiously?”

“Well, you didn't actually say your twin was a boy, but I thought if it had been a girl you would have mentioned it. Anyway, the reaction came back like a whiplash: ‘Well, if you're
unlucky enough to meet him again, tell him not to get in touch.' Still in this high, power-drill sort of voice.”

“Oh dear. Sounds like Frere was right in his forebodings.”

“Very much so. There's nothing much more. I mentioned this article, said I was having difficulty getting hold of it, wondered if she had an offprint from the journal it appeared in. And she just broke in on me: ‘Oh, for God's sake, look at it in a library like anyone else.' Then put the phone down.”

“Nice type, obviously.”

“That's what I thought. Though of course she was right: it was one of my thinner pretexts. Now Marryott. There are some spelled like that in the telephone directory, but not too many. I rang University College and spoke to someone in the English Department office—said I needed to speak to Patrick Marryott's widow about a reprint of his book on the Problem Comedies. She said, ‘Samantha Marryott, oh yes, she lives in Pe—' Then she stopped, obviously reined in by someone else. She must have put her hand over the receiver, then came back and said: ‘Actually I've just been reminded that we don't give out addresses or telephone numbers. If you would care to send a letter to us here we'll make sure it is forwarded to her.'”

“It wasn't too difficult. A London suburb beginning with P—not many of those.”

“If she was living in London at all, of course,” agreed Susan. “But I went back to the directory, found an S. Marryott in Peckham, and decided to go along and have a look for myself. The address was Two Underwood Lane—little terrace cottages from the early nineteenth century, mostly prettified up. I parked some way away, and as I was approaching I saw a woman leaving Number Two. There was a neighbor raking up leaves in the tiny apron of front garden all the cottages have, and I asked her if that was Mrs. Marryott who had just left. ‘Oh yes, that's her,' she said, with a touch of grimness. ‘Widow of the university
professor?' ‘That's it. Married him when she was twenty-one and he was fifty. Now he's dead, and she's even more firmly wedded to the bottle than she was when he was alive. She's on her way to the Cock and Pheasant now—goes there every lunchtime without fail. You can set your clock by her—five to twelve, to be there on opening time. What a waste of a life.'”

I looked around the saloon bar as casually as I could. There were not many candidates to choose from. Sitting on one of the bar stools and slumped over a drink on the bar itself was a woman running to fat, with dry-looking blonde hair and makeup that had been put on with a shaky hand and a bleary eye.

“That's her,” said Susan. “And I thought that if anyone was going to get anything out of a sexy middle-aged lush, it would have to be a man, Colin.”

T
he next day, Friday, was the first reading of a Private Member's Bill of no particular interest to me (or to anybody else except the private member in question). I was due in my constituency for a meeting that evening, but lunchtime could be free. This time I managed to do without my driver, took the underground to the Oval, then a bus to Peckham High Street, which was bustling and invigorating with early weekend shoppers of every age, class, and race. To turn off it to get to the little street in which the Cock and Pheasant was situated was to go back to the dispiriting fifties (or so it seemed to me, who knew the decade only through black-and-white films shown at unearthly hours on the television).

When I got to the pub my quarry was already planted on a bar stool—a regular and valued customer, obviously, in a drinking place that had few of those. She was wearing old green and brown checked slacks and a purple jumper. Both had seen better times more recently than they had seen the inside of a dry cleaner's. No amount of makeup could disguise the fact that her face was becoming puffy and raddled, looking like a collection of old string bags on a hook in the scullery. She gave off a
smell of carelessness and hopelessness, of being already, and prematurely, at the end of the line.

I took up a position at the bar beside her, but there was no sign of a landlord or a barman.

“Marvyn's down the cellar fetching tonics,” my neighbor volunteered in slurred tones.

“Oh well, no hurry,” I said, making a pantomime of looking around me at the near-empty barroom.

“Looking for someone?”

“Oh, just my researcher. She said she might be in, and might not.”

Her cheeks bobbed as her mouth twisted in scorn.

“Researcher! Another frigging academic! . . . That the girl you were with yesterday?”

“You're a sharp one,” I commented, mentally adding, “Sharper than you look.” She disclaimed the compliment, her scorn now seeming to turn away from academics on to herself.

“You notice new people in a dead-and-alive hole like this. I only come because it's cheap. Cheap and nasty go together, don't they? Here's Marvyn now.”

Marvyn was the sort of barman who announces in his own person that you're in a pub on No Hope Street, and not too far from the end of the road. Below his rolled-up sleeves his arms were tattooed with the dismal record of his loves and his enthusiasms—Sharon and Sinead sharing space with Chelsea Football Club and Barry McGuigan. He had two rings in one ear and a stud in either nostril, and he took my order for a pint of best without comment or interest. Drink would have to be cheap here, because there was no other reason for coming.

“Will you have one with me?” I asked my companion.

“Wouldn't mind at all,” she said, brightening up and actually turning to look at me. “I'll have a gin and tonic.” She sipped again at the one she had got, still two-thirds full.

“Same again for the lady,” I told Marvyn, who went about it with the inscrutability usually attributed to the Chinese.

“Forget what I said about academics,” she said in her new mood. “There's good and bad in all professions, isn't there?”

“There certainly is,” I said heartily, refraining from saying there had probably been some quite delightful public executioners. “I'm Derek Barton, by the way.”

“Samantha Marryott.” She smiled, with the last shadows of a coquettish expression.

“So how did you come by your jaundiced view of academics then, Samantha?”

She let out a short bark of laughter.

“I married one. It never fails. What's more to the point, I stayed married to him—stuck it out for years and years, till the nasty old prick died. I could have got out, got myself a life. 'Stead of which, having trapped myself, I stayed in the trap. Tell you what, we were barmy, my generation.”

Since by my guess she probably grew to adulthood in the late sixties or early seventies, I didn't think fidelity to the matrimonial ideal was something she could blame on the Zeitgeist. However, I feigned agreement.

“You've got a point there.”

“Know what they say about the past being another country? Well, that's bang on, in my case. He got me when I was a slip of a thing. Wouldn't think that was possible, to see me now, would you?” She made facial gestures in the direction of a simper, and I made the expected noises of demurral. “I was in my second year, and green as a hothouse plant. You wouldn't believe it, but I regarded all the teachers with awe, and a professor was God himself. I said I was green, didn't I? You sleeping with your researcher, then?”

I fielded the wicked ball as best I could.

“Not at the moment.”

“So what do you mean—you used to be or you're hoping to be? Oh, forget I said that. Pretend I didn't ask. Soured by experience, that's me.”

“By your experiences with—what?—Professor Marryott?”

“That's him. That was him. It's like looking through the mists of time. When he started putting the hard word on me I was flattered. Can you imagine it? I was a pretty twenty-one-year-old—no, I was a
gorgeous
twenty-one-year-old—and I was flattered this overweight fifty-year-old with the prick he couldn't control wanted to get me to bed. What the hell did I think he'd want from me? To hear my gems of wisdom on image clusters in
Much Ado About Nothing
? I was a little fool, and he knew it and took advantage.”

“But still you got him to marry you.”

Her eyes glinted with cunning.

“I had that much
nous.
 . . .” Then she suffered a revulsion or reversal of feeling and banged her glass down. “God, listen to me. You'd think I was incapable of learning, wouldn't you? It wasn't
nous,
it was stupidity. If I'd had any brains I'd just have slept with him like everyone else. To hear me talk you'd think marriage with him was a big deal.”

I let her gaze into the depth of the bar pools for some seconds.

“I've never been married. I don't know whether marriage with anybody is a big deal.”

That interested her.

“Have you not? Nice-looking, well-set-up chap like you.” There was a suspicion of a leer behind her remarks. Perhaps she had caught it from her husband. Or perhaps their leers had brought them together. “But then, probably you've made the right decision,” she said. “You'd be wasted in a marriage.”

Her moment of introspection was over, and she'd gone back to her gin and tonic.

“I'll take that as a compliment. Is that what happened in your case? I suppose you found it restricted you too much.”

This time she definitely did leer.

“You're joking! When I had a husband like mine? Not so you'd notice, I can tell you.”

“Still, it's obviously left you bitter.”

“Bitter? Too damned right I'm bitter. Look, I knew what he was like from the day I sat in the lecture room for his first performance to my year. On the fucking
ethos
of Shakespearean comedy. Some people lecture to individuals in the audience: one at the front, one in the middle, one toward the back. Patrick didn't do that. He picked out in the first five minutes the first batch of students he intended to bed, and then he lectured to them. He was famous for it. I had been around for a year, so I knew the score: I'd heard all about it long before I went to his lectures and tutorials.”

“So you weren't quite as green as that hothouse plant.”

She giggled.

“It's a good line. And makes me feel less bad about it.”