Frequent Hearses (13 page)

“Your round, old man.”

“Is it?”

“You know bloody well it is.” Mr. Snerd spoke without rancour; attempts to avoid paying for rounds were part of his conception of Mr. Rouncey as a ‘character’. “I’ll have the same again.”

Mr. Rouncey resignedly gave the order.

“Well?” said Mr. Snerd.

“Yes, it’s hot stuff all right,” said Mr. Rouncey. “Too bloody hot, if you ask me.”

“Don’t tell me that. You can use it.”

“How do I know it isn’t a fake?”

“You’ve got my word for it,” said Mr. Snerd with dignity.

“Oh, yes. Sure I have. But my News Editor doesn’t know you, Bart boy, not like I do. It’s him that’s got to be persuaded.”

“Get a sample of Crane’s writing. Have ‘em compared.”

“Where the hell do you think I can… Wait, though.” Mr. Rouncey, in a formidable burst of energy, contrived to snap his fingers. “He wrote a letter to the paper, not more than a week ago, and I’ve an idea it was written, not typed. There’s a chance there.”

“Go for it, old man.”

“It’ll have to be carefully written up,” said Mr. Rouncey meditatively. “Full of
allegeds
and
we make no comment.
Whatever happens it’ll mean a libel action, but we might get away with that on the Public Interest tack… Where’d you get the letter?”

Mr. Snerd winked. “Blew out of a window. So of course I had to look at it to see whose it was, and there weren’t any surnames or addresses, so I brought it along to you thinking you might be able to help, and—”

“Stow all that, Bart boy,” said Mr. Rouncey amiably. “It won’t do for the paper. I think our line’ll be that it came anonymously through the post, from someone who wanted to See Justice Done. Of course, we don’t like anonymous letters, not when we’re holding forth to the ruddy public anyway, but we thought it was our duty as citizens to get the handwriting experts on to it and then turn it over to the police… Yes, that’s our line, I’d say: just reporting what we’ve done. We Make No Comment And Shall Be More Delighted Than Anyone If The Name of These Fine Artists Can Be Cleared.” Exhausted by his performance, Mr. Rouncey paused and groped for his drink. “Here, let’s have another look at the thing.”

Mr. Snerd handed the letter over, and Mr. Rouncey, shaking away the tears which blurred his vision, read it again.

“Jedd,” he murmured. “We’ll have to rout him out before we print anything.”

“Who is Jedd, anyway?”

“Theatrical manager.
Lover’s Luck
, at the Curtain.” Mr. Rouncey’s eyes widened suddenly “That’d be it, Bart boy.”

“What’d be what?”

“This Scott girl stood in for Marcia Bloom at Tuesday’s performances. I remember hearing Sark—that’s our theatre stooge—talking about it.”

“So what, old man?”

“Easy. When you sign up with the films you guarantee not to appear in any shows without permission. So it looks as if Crane tricked the Scott girl into thinking she’d got the studios’ permission to play in
Lover’s Luck
when actually she hadn’t. And that meant Crane could blackmail her into cancelling the contract by threatening a suit for breach.”

Mr. Snerd was genuinely indignant at this disclosure. “Dirty trick,” he said.

“Show business, that’s all.” Mr. Rouncey, Mr. Snerd felt, was sneering at his ingenuousness. “Well, we’ll have to see what can be done.” He got unsteadily to his feet. “How much do you want?”

“A clear one-fifty.”

“You won’t get that much, Bart boy.”

“That’s my price,” said Mr. Snerd easily. “It’s up to you to get it. I’ll collect in ‘The Feathers’ at opening time tonight.” He caught Mr. Rouncey by the elbow as he turned to go. “And you won’t forget I know about that business at Brighton, will you, old man? I shouldn’t like you to get into any trouble over that.”

“Ruddy blackmailer,” said Mr. Rouncey.

“Now, that’s no way to talk,” said Mr. Snerd eupeptically. “We’re good pals, aren’t we? You do your best for me, and I’ll do my best for you. Can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

Mr. Rouncey was pocketing the letter.

“Bart boy, I can’t promise anything,” he said earnestly. “This ruddy letter’s dynamite, see? If I can sell it ‘em at all, you’ll get your money. And that’s the most I can say.” He moved towards the door. “Remember, boy, it’s ten to one they just won’t touch it at all, scoop or no.”

But Mr. Rouncey’s prognosis was altogether too flattering to his employers’ sense of decency. They touched it all right.

As its custom was, the four o’clock edition of
The Evening Mercury
appeared on the streets of London at about three.

It was not a paper which Humbleby read, except when his business compelled him to or when, for masochistic or argumentative reasons, he felt the need to convince himself of the imminent collapse of all moral and cultural values. But on this fateful Monday it was on his desk by five past three, carried there by a sergeant with the air of those heralds in Greek tragedy who convey calamitous and often barely credible news to choruses of aghast and wondering citizens.

Humbleby had twice refused promotion, since he was not anxious for the increase in purely administrative work which it would certainly involve; but in spite of this (or perhaps even because of it) he was a person of some consequence at Scotland Yard, and his rage—the more impressive because it was so rare—spread through that elaborate hierarchy like an etheric wave. Indeed, the oily young man from the
Mercury
who brought him the original of Nicholas Crane’s letter received from him such summary and shattering treatment that on emerging from the building he had to go to the park and sit down in order to recover himself.

The story had been written up very much on the lines contemplated by Mr. Rouncey. Its insinuations disported themselves beneath banner headlines, and the letter itself was reproduced in facsimile. Humbleby gazed upon it and fluently cursed; in spite of what he had said over the telephone, he was keeping Fen’s theory of the case well in mind, and if that theory were correct, the
Mercury
had gratuitously performed a valuable service for the murderer in telling him where next to direct his energies.

As to the genuineness of the letter Humbleby was not in much doubt, but he passed it on to the Yard handwriting experts for their opinion. And having done that he set off, compassed about with a cloud of subordinates, to investigate its history.

The editor of
The Evening Mercury
received him with ill-concealed apprehension: Humbleby’s mood made him appear disconcertingly like an agent of the Eumenides. Yes, said the editor, the letter had been sent anonymously through the post. To him personally? Well, no; actually to one of his reporters…

Mr. Rouncey, far advanced in liquor and weeping copiously, was produced. With Mr. Snerd’s knowledge of the Brighton affair vivid in his mind, he corroborated with unshakable obstinacy his editor’s account of the letter’s provenance. In the end Humbleby was obliged to leave them, unenlightened; but he thought it in the highest degree unlikely that Madge Crane would have left the letter lying about for anyone to pick up, and that must mean that it had been stolen. He drove on, accordingly, to her flat, where he found Felicity, a regular reader of the
Mercury,
in a very shaken and pensive frame of mind.

Judge’s Rules went overboard in the interview that followed; Humbleby thought it improbable that Felicity had stolen the letter herself, since its publication was bound to bring her instantly under suspicion, but his examination was none the less completely ruthless. And Felicity, perceiving that her future as an employee of Miss Crane was now in any event dubious to a degree, did not fence with him for very long. She, too, saw that the letter must have been feloniously taken, and she had no doubt in her mind as to who had taken it. Thus it was that the whole story came out.

Long ago, she told Humbleby, she had suspected that “Peter Williams” was not what he represented himself to be. She had not specially resented his attempt at camouflage, but she had felt it necessary in her own interests to find out who he really was, and had therefore, one midday after they had said good-bye, followed him unobtrusively back to his office in Long Acre, and there acquainted herself with his true identity. He had spent the night with her at the flat, she said, and had left before she was awake. She was sure it was him as had done the thieving, the rotten dirty sneak, and left her to take the blame.

Where would Miss Crane have been likely to hide the letter? Well, there was a locked drawer in the desk in the sitting-room…

Humbleby, finding the desk suspiciously innocent of all finger-prints, was much inclined to concur in Felicity’s view of the matter. He haled her away with him to Long Acre in his car.

And there, sure enough, they came upon Mr. Snerd in his office, humming tunefully to himself and tidying up in readiness for his projected vacation. Confronted simultaneously by Felicity and the police, he was at first all injured innocence. But Humbleby had a shrewd notion that Mr. Snerd had handed the letter direct to Mr. Rouncey, and he stated, simply and firmly, that Mr. Rouncey had admitted this.

Thereupon Mr. Snerd lost his head, and fell to regaling them alternately with admissions of his own guilt and denunciations of Mr. Rouncey’s supposititious treachery. Mr. Snerd was determined that if he were going to sink, Mr. Rouncey should sink with him, and he waxed orotund over the details of the Brighton affair. It concerned, apparently, the deliberate suppression for a bribe’s sake of evidence important to the elucidation of a race-course affray two years previously—but this was not Humbleby’s business and he did not pay any very earnest attention to it. Leaving it to the cloud of subordinates to see to the arrests of both Mr. Snerd and Mr. Rouncey, he drove back alone to New Scotland Yard, conscious of having done a very satisfactory two hours’ work.

The next step, obviously, was to see Nicholas Crane. Humbleby telephoned his flat in Mayfair, but there was no reply. Application to his mother’s house had better results: he had driven there, it seemed, as soon as he had seen
The Evening Mercury.

Humbleby collected certain chemicals and apparatus from the Yard’s laboratories—a consequence, this precaution, of his unwilling respect for Fen’s intelligence—and at six-thirty set out for Aylesbury.

He came to Lanthorn House, the residence of Mrs. Crane, as the last light was dropping over the western horizon. The house lay embowered in a cup-like confluence of low hills—so deeply embowered, indeed, that from the road it was not visible at all. Humbleby drove through dimly discerned heraldic gates, with adjacent stone-built lodges, and was at once among the trees of a large and unkempt estate. The carriage-way ran gradually and inexorably downwards; a gardener, trudging homewards in the company of an unattractive little girl, stopped and stared at Humbleby as he passed; massive rhododendron bushes loomed up on either side. And now, having at last achieved the floor of the hollow, Humbleby turned sharp left round a clutter of outhouses, and the featureless bulk of the house was in front of him. Between a phalanx of Corinthian pillars and a pedimented front door he brought the car to a halt and climbed out.

On the railway line which skirted the far side of the grounds a goods train whistled sardonically and clanked with deliberation out of earshot. Humbleby pressed the bell. Above his head the light of a caged electric bulb waxed and waned in rhythm with the pulsing of a heavy-oil engine which had become audible as soon as the car’s ignition was switched off. He waited, and presently, becoming irritable at the delay in admitting him, pressed the bell again; and he was about to supplement this by plying the ornate brass knocker when the door was opened to him by an old, improvident-looking butler.

“No Press,” said the butler promptly. “Be off with you, now, and quick about it.”

“I am the police,” said Humbleby coldly. “Please take me immediately to Mr. Nicholas Crane.”

The butler peered at him with suspicion.

“You’re not the one,” he said, “as came and took away Mr. Maurice’s medicine bottle. Don’t you try any tricks on me, now.”

“Stop arguing and let me in. It was one of my subordinates who was here before.”

“A nice character you are to ’ave subordinates,” said the butler resentfully. “I’ll bet they love you like a father… Well, I’ll ’ave to admit you, I s’pose. Come on in and don’t keep me standing ere ’alf the night.”

Thus graciously inducted, Humbleby climbed the three shallow treads to the threshold and stepped inside. A mass of gleaming white statuary confronted him; the room, large and high as a gymnasium, was disposed about it like a frame. Faraday, the statuary might be; or Samuel Rogers; or just conceivably Palmerstone. Seated, it stared apprehensively at the door, as though anticipating the arrival of duns or bailiffs. Its base pinned a large though inferior Turkey carpet to the parquet floor. Portraits in ponderous gilt frames conversed wordlessly, and with the effect of administering a decisive snub, across the top of its head. A number of well-polished but clearly functionless tables—of the sort described as ‘occasional’, but whose occasion somehow never arises—were ranged about the room’s periphery like sitters-out at a ball. And the only other furniture consisted of two immense Victorian hat and umbrella stands which, flanking the door, flourished a multiplicity of knob-crowned arms, Vishnu-like, at the ceiling.

“You just wait ’ere,” said the butler brusquely, “and I’ll go and find out what’s to be done about you.”

He departed, and Humbleby resigned himself patiently to waiting; his profession had long since inured him to kicking his heels in ante-rooms at the pleasure of householders a great deal less cultivated and estimable than himself—and one usually, he reflected, got one’s own back on them in the end. Comforted by this inexplicit prospect of retribution, Humbleby glanced idly up at the ceiling, where a number of ethereally graceful gods and goddesses were rioting about in one of those complicated and implausible intrigues which were apparently the main preoccupation of Olympus’ waking hours. Angelica Kaufmann, perhaps; it was quite good enough for that. And to judge from this hallway, the rest of Lanthorn House would probably exhibit a very similar mingling of the aesthetically desirable and the aesthetically null… It did not belong to Mrs. Crane, of course: she had rented it six months ago from Lord Boscoign, latest and probably last holder of an irremediably obscure barony, whose grandfather had refurnished it in its present style by dint of selling the near-by village, and who was now living precariously on its rent in a Harrogate boarding-house. A place as large as this, Humbleby reflected, must cost a good deal to run these days. So also must racehorses—and he had learned that these were Mrs. Crane’s chief interest in life. So a windfall of fifty thousand pounds would very likely come in useful, and…