More Work for the Undertaker (3 page)

As he raised his head from this engaging document there was a movement from the inner doorway behind him and the floor shook a little.

‘'Mazing cheek, ain't it?' Magersfontein Lugg's lush personality pervaded the room like a smell of cooking. He was in
déshabillé
, appearing at first sight to be attired as the hinder part of a pantomime elephant, and was holding out in front of him a mighty woollen undervest. The ‘impossible voice' to which the great lady had referred so recently was after all only a matter of taste. There was expression and flexibility in that rich rumble which many actors might have sought to imitate in vain.

‘Wot a 'orrible man too. Bowels by name and Bowels by nature. I said that when she married 'im.'

‘At the actual wedding?' inquired his employer with interest.

‘Over me one 'alf of British champagne.' He appeared to recall the incident with satisfaction.

Campion laid a hand on the telephone.

‘Who was she? Your only love?'

‘Gawd, no! My sis. 'E's my brother-in-law, the poor worm shoveller. 'Aven't spoke to 'im for thirty years nor thought of 'im till this come just now.'

Campion was startled into meeting the eyes of his ancient companion, a thing he had not been able to do for some few weeks.

‘'E took it as a compliment.' The beady eyes peered out from their surrounding folds with a truculence which did not hide the reproach or even the panic lurking there. ‘That's the kind of bloke Jas is. Come my little trip inside, 'e be'aved as though I'd took 'im with me, sent back me wedding
present to Beatt with a few questions not in the taste you and me is accustomed to. I wrote 'im clean off my slate. Now 'e pops up, says by the way me sis is dead some time, which I knew, and asks a favour. It's a coincidence, that's all. Would you like me to go outside while you do your bit of telephonin'?'

The thin man in the spectacles turned away from the desk.

‘Is this a put-up job?' he inquired briefly.

The place where Mr Lugg's eyebrows may once have been rose to meet the naked dome of his skull. He folded his vest with great deliberation.

‘Some remarks I do not 'ear,' he said, achieving dignity. ‘I am just puttin' my things together. It's all right. I've got my advert wrote out.'

‘Your what?'

‘My advert. “Gentleman's gentleman seeks interesting employment. Remarkable references. Title preferred.” That's about it. I can't come with you, cock. I don't want to see meself an international incident.'

Mr Campion sat down to re-read the letter.

‘When exactly did this arrive?'

‘Late post, ten minutes ago. Show you the envelope if you're suspicious.'

‘Could old Renee Roper have put him up to it?'

‘She didn't marry our Beatt to 'im thirty-five years ago, if that's what you mean.' Lugg was contemptuous. ‘Don't be so nervy. 'E's only a coincidence, the second you've 'ad over this Palinode caper. Don't you get excited, though. There's no need for it. What's Jas to you anyway?'

‘The third crow, if you're interested,' said Mr Campion and, after a while, began to look quietly happy.

THE D.D.I. WAS
waiting in the upstairs room of the Platelayers Arms, a discreet old-fashioned drinking house in one of the more obscure streets of his district.

Campion met him there at a few minutes after eight, as the Superintendent promised he should. Over the telephone Yeo had sounded relieved and pleased.

‘I knew all along you'd never resist it,' he said cheerfully. ‘You can't change your spots. It's something in a man's character which draws him to a certain type of happening. I've seen it scores of times. You've been sent by heaven, let alone Headquarters, to the family Palinode. I'll get on to Charlie Luke at once. You'd better meet him in that pub they use in Edwardes Place. You'll take to Charlie.'

And now, as he came up the wooden stairs and entered the varnished cabin which overhung the huge circular bar, Mr Campion's pale eyes rested on Bill Luke's boy. The D.D.I. was a tough. Seated on the edge of the table, his hands in his pockets, his hat over his eyes, his muscles spoiling the shape of his civilian coat, he might well have been a gangster. There was a lot of him, but his compact and sturdy bones tended to disguise his height. He had a live dark face with a strong nose, narrow vivid eyes, and his smile, which was ready, had yet a certain ferocity.

He got up at once, hand outstretched.

‘Glad to see you, sir,' he said and conveyed distinctly that he hoped to God he was.

The Divisional Detective Inspector is in sole and complete charge of his own territory until something happens inside it which is so interesting that his Area Superintendent at the Yard feels it his duty to send him help. To that help, despite
his superior knowledge of the district, he is always liable to find himself second-in-command. Campion sympathized.

‘I hope it's not as bad as that,' he said disarmingly. ‘How many Palinode murders have you actually got on your hands so far?'

The narrow eyes flickered at him and he saw that the man was younger than he had supposed, thirty-four or five at the most, sensationally young for his rank.

‘First, what will you drink?' Luke thumped the humpbacked bell on the table. ‘We'll get Ma Chubb safely out of earshot and I'll give you the full strength.'

The licensee waited upon them herself. She was a quick-eyed, quick-moving little person with a politely worried face and grey hair coiled into intricate patterns under a net.

She nodded to Campion without looking at him directly and trotted out with the money.

‘Well now,' said Charlie Luke, his eyes snapping and the trace of a country inflexion creeping into his voice, which was as strong and pliant as his shoulders, ‘I don't know what you've heard so far but I'll rough it out as it's come to me. It began with poor little old Doctor Smith.'

Campion had never heard before of this particular Doctor Smith but suddenly he was in the room with them. He took shape like a portrait under a pencil.

‘A tallish old boy – well, not so very old, fifty-five, married to a shrew. Overworked. Over-conscientious. Comes out of his flat nagged to a rag in the mornings and goes down to his surgery – room with a shop front like a laundry. Stooping. Back like a camel. Loose trousers, poking at the seat as if God were holding him up by the centre buttons. Head stuck out like a tortoise, waving slightly. Worried eyes. Good chap. Kind. Not as bright as some (no time for it) but professional. Old school, not old school tie. Servant of his calling and don't forget it. He starts getting poison pen letters. Shakes him.'

Charlie Luke spoke without syntax or noticeable coherence but he talked with his whole body. When he described Doctor Smith's back his own arched. When he mentioned the shop front he squared it in with his hands. His tremendous
strength, which was physical rather than nervous, poured into the recital, forcing the facts home like a pile-driver.

Campion was made to share the Doctor's scandalized anxiety. The man talked like an avalanche.

‘Show you the file of filth later,' he said. ‘This is just the outline.' He was off again, vigorous muscular mouth pumping out the words, hands rubbing them in. ‘Usual scurrilous stuff. Had a psycho on them. Says of course probably female, but very experienced sexually and not as uneducated as one would think from the spelling. They accused the Doc of conniving at murder. Old lady called Ruth Palinode murdered, buried, no questions asked, Doc to blame. Doc gets wind up slowly. Feels patients may be getting the same letters. Chance remarks seem to mean more than they were ever meant to. Poor old blighter starts thinking. Goes over old woman's symptoms. Frightened to hell. Tells his wife, who uses it as a handle to torment him. He gets in nervous state, has to go to brother medico, who makes him call us in. The whole thing's passed to me.'

He took a breath and a gulp of whisky and water.

‘“Good God, boy!” he says to me, “it may have been arsenic. I never thought of poison.” “Well, Doc,” I said to him, “it may have been wind. Anyway it's worrying somebody. We'll find out and that'll settle it.” Now we go to Apron Street.'

‘I'm with you,' said Mr Campion, trying not to sound breathless. ‘That's the Palinode house, is it?'

‘Not yet. Got to get the street roughed in. Street important. Narrow little way. Small shops either side. Old Brotherhood chapel, now the Thespis Rep Theatre, highbrow, harmless, one end; Portminster Lodge, the Palinode house, the other. The district's gone down like a drunk in thirty years and the Palinodes with it. Now a dear old variety gal turned lodging-house keeper owns their house. Mortgage fell in, she inherited, her own place got bombed, so she moved over with some of her old boarders and took the Palinode family in her stride.'

‘Miss Roper's an old acquaintance of mine.'

‘Is she, though?' The bright eyes widened from slits to diamonds. ‘Then you can tell me something. Could she have written the letters?'

Campion's brows rose up behind his spectacles.

‘I don't know her sufficiently well to say,' he murmured. ‘I should have guessed that she was the last person in the world not to have signed her name.'

‘Oh, so should I. I love her.' Luke spoke earnestly. ‘But you never know, do you?' He thrust out a great hand. ‘Think of it. Woman alone, happy life gone, nothing but drudgery, boredom, hatred very likely of toffee-nosed old scroungers. Perhaps they turn on the “my good woman” when it's her perishing house.'

He paused. ‘Don't think I blame her,' he said with simple earnestness. ‘Everybody's mind has its dregs. As I see it, it's the circumstances which stir 'em up. I'm not shooting at the poor old blossom, I just want to know. She might have wanted to turn the whole gang of 'em out and not known quite how to do it, or she might have fallen for the Doc and wanted to hurt him. She's old for that, of course.'

‘Anyone else?'

‘Who might have written 'em? About five hundred. Any one of the Doc's patients. He's got a very funny manner when that basket of a wife of his has been at him, and they're all ill to start with, aren't they? Now there's the street. I can't take you through it house by house or we'll be here all night. Drink up, sir. But I'll give you the smell of it. There's a grocer's and ironmonger's on the corner opposite the theatre. He's a country chap gone Cockney fifty years ago. He runs his place as if it were a trading post somewhere. Tick unlimited. Gets into trouble, keeps the cheese too near the paraffin and hasn't been the same man since his wife died. He's known the Palinodes all his life. Their father helped him when he was starting and but for him some of them would starve at the end of a quarter, I fancy.

‘Next door to the grocer is the coal office, he's new. Then we come to the Doc's outfit. Then there's the greengrocers. They're okay. Big family of girls. Paint all over their faces and
dirt all over their hands. And then, Mr Campion, there's the chemist.'

He had been keeping his voice down but the strength of it even when suppressed was liable to set the panelling vibrating. The sudden silence as he paused was grateful.

‘Chemist of interest?' encouraged his listener, who found himself fascinated by the performance.

‘Pa Wilde would be interesting if he was only on the pictures,' said Charlie Luke. ‘What a shop, eh! What an emporium! Ever heard of
Old Ma Appleyard's Dynamite Cough Cure and Intestine Controller
? Of course you haven't, but your grandpa used to bung himself up with it, I bet. And you can still buy it there if you want to, in the original wrapping. He's got dozens of little drawers of muck, smell of old lady's bedroom enough to knock you back, and old Pa Wilde in the middle of it looking like auntie's ruin with his dyed hair, collar like this' – he strained his chin upwards and made his eyes bulge – ‘little black tie, striped trousers. When old Joey and Pantaloon Bowels dug up Miss Ruth Palinode and we all stood round in the cold waiting for Sir Doberman to get his damned jars loaded, I must say I started thinking about Pa Wilde. I don't say he administered whatever it was but I bet it came from there.'

‘When do you expect the analyst's report?'

‘We've had a provisional one. The final isn't till tonight. Promised for midnight. If it's something that could only have been criminally administered, we wake up the undertakers and dig up the brother right away. I've got the order. I hate that job. All stones and stinks.'

He shook his head as a wet dog does and took a drink.

‘That's the eldest brother, I take it? The eldest of them all?'

‘Yes. Edward Palinode, age sixty-seven at the time of his decease, which was last March. What's that, seven months? Let's hope he's settled. It's a damp old cemetery, ought to be done away with.'

Mr Campion smiled. ‘You've left me at the shady chemist's,' he said. ‘Where do we go? Straight into the Palinodes' house?'

The D.D.I. considered. ‘May as well,' he agreed with unexpected reluctance. ‘On the other side of the road there's only that old blighter Bowels, the bank, which is a small branch of Clough's, the entrance to the Mews, and the worst pub in the world called the Footman's. Righto, sir, now we come to the house itself. It's on the corner, same side as the chemist. It's enormous. It's got a basement as I told you. It's shabby as a camel and on one side it's got a little sand and laurel yard of a garden. All cats and paper bags.'

He paused. Some of the enthusiasm had gone from him and his angled eyes watched Campion gloomily.

‘I tell you what,' he said with sudden relief. ‘I can show you the Captain now, I expect.' He got up softly and with that cautious gentleness peculiar to the very powerful lifted down a large framed poster advertising Irish whiskey which occupied a centre position on the inner wall. Behind it was a small glazed window through which a prudent landlord might obtain a clear overhead view of the whole of the public part of his house. The partitions which formed the various bars radiated from the central counter like the spokes of a wheel, containing segments of crowd. The two men stood well back, their heads together, and peered down.