Frequent Hearses (6 page)

“Anything else?” Johnny asked. “Because if there isn’t I ought to be getting back. Mind you behave yourself, Miss Sex Appeal,” he said to Valerie Bryant, “or they’ll put you in the lock-up. I’ll say cheerio, then. John Wilberforce Mornington signing off, at your service now as always.” With this, mercifully, he went. And Humbleby, clearing his throat in an embarrassed fashion, said “Do please sit down, Miss Bryant.”

Miss Bryant sat down—with extreme caution, on the edge of a chair—and gazed upon them out of wide, pathetic eyes. “I ’as to be careful,” she ventured, “not to get the make-up rubbed on me legs and arms.”

“Yes,” said Humbleby. “Yes, I’m sure you do.”

Miss Bryant evidently did not find this ready acquiescence at all consoling, for she began to tremble again, though less violently than before. “I—is it true, sir,” she stammered, “that you’re from the p’lice?”

“Yes, it’s true enough,” said Humbleby, “but you’ve absolutely no cause to be alarmed, Miss Bryant. All I want is to ask you a few questions about Gloria Scott.”

“Gloria?” Miss Bryant was startled. “She ain’t in no trouble, sir, is she?”

Humbleby shook his head soberly. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, Miss Bryant, that she has—um—committed suicide.”

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.