Sunlight streamed into the sitting room through the bay window and Langham heard birdsong in the trees that lined the quiet street. Half-awake, he propped himself up on one elbow and looked across the room. Maria was sitting on the window seat in her dressing gown, her bare feet lodged on a chair and the gown open to reveal her legs. She was absorbed in a book, head bowed, and the expression on her face intent. She looked across at him briefly, concerned.
‘Good book?’ he murmured, turning over. She didn’t reply. He closed his eyes and sank back into semi-sleep, cheered by the thought that today they were going to the coast.
He came awake some time later and glanced at the wall clock. It was eight thirty. He turned over at a sound. Maria was striding up and down the room like a caged tiger, her right hand pressed to her mouth.
‘Maria?’
She sat down quickly on the settee and stared at him with stricken eyes. He repeated her name, wondering at the change that had come over her.
‘We can’t go to Suffolk, Donald.’
He reached out and took her hand. ‘What?’
‘I woke up at six and I could not sleep. I began reading – one of Pearson’s books. I couldn’t put it down.’
‘You’re sounding like the back-cover blurb—’
‘Be serious!’ She stared at him. ‘I had to keep reading. The book is about … It’s silly, but a character wants to kill his wife’s lover, so he devises a way of luring him from London.’ She hurried across the room, grabbed the book from the window seat and returned to the bed.
Langham took the book. Death by the Sea.
He looked up at Maria. ‘I don’t understand …’
‘The husband writes a letter to his wife’s lover, saying he is the proprietor of a hotel and inviting him on a free holiday as some kind of promotion. The lover takes up the offer, with the wife, and when they get there …’ She gestured at the open book. ‘Then the husband strangles them both … It’s horrible, horrible!’
Langham began to say that it was merely a coincidence, but Maria silenced him with a finger pressed to his lips.
‘Don’t you see? Pearson planned this. He wants to lure you to the coast, with me, and there he plans to …’ She continued, ‘It’s just too much of a coincidence, Donald. He killed all those writers in ways he wrote about in his books – and this is how he plans to murder you … and me.’
He opened the book.
‘It starts on page one hundred and seventy,’ she said, ‘when the lovers arrive at the hotel on the coast.’
Donald began reading feverishly, skimming the overwritten prose and stilted dialogue. The scene lasted for five pages, padded with unnecessary exposition as the husband tied up his wife and her lover and explained his motivations. It had never been his intention to kill just the lover – he intended to kill them both, as due punishment. He strangled the lover, and then did the same to his wife.
Langham stopped reading, sickened by the gratuity and relish with which Pearson described the killings. Had Pearson’s books been a kind of sublimation of his need to commit murder – a subconscious desire he was now making real?
He laid the novel aside, considering this latest turn of events. ‘So we know where he’ll be …’ he said.
Maria stared at him. ‘What?’
‘You’re right – all this, the invitation – it’s a set up. But we’re ahead of him. We know where he’ll be.’
She nodded. ‘So we call Jeff Mallory and the police will go and arrest Pearson.’
He said, ‘Or I go alone, confront him …’
She stared at him, aghast. ‘I won’t let you go, Donald!’
‘I’ll go armed,’ he found himself saying. ‘I can pick up a revolver on the way.’
‘No. This is madness. I won’t let you!’
He reached out and squeezed her hand. He thought of Frankie Pearson and what he’d done to his friends, Charles and Nigel, and to Justin Fellowes and the others. He looked into himself and realized that what he really wanted was vengeance; he wanted to shoot Frankie Pearson dead.
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve been alone too long. I was thinking only of … I want to punish Frankie Pearson so much for what he’s done, for the hurt he’s caused.’
‘But killing him,’ she whispered, ‘won’t lessen that hurt.’
He realized then that the choice was really no choice at all: what he felt for Maria was far stronger than the need for vengeance.
He said, ‘I’ll call Mallory, explain the situation. They can go and arrest him.’
She plastered his cheeks with tearful kisses of relief. ‘Thank you, Donald.’
He dressed, splashed his face with cold water, then got through to Mallory and explained the situation. The detective heard him out, then observed grimly, ‘Hoist, I think the saying goes, by his own petard. I’ll be over in thirty minutes. I’ll need to see the letter he sent – you have it with you?’
‘It’s in my case.’
‘Good work, Donald. I’ll be right over.’
Maria was standing beside the kitchen door, watching him. He crossed the room and held her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s coming to an end.’
‘It has been a nightmare.’
He had an idea. ‘When they’ve arrested Pearson, let’s celebrate.’
‘Celebrate?’
‘Let’s find a quiet hotel on the coast and spend a long weekend away from London – a legitimate hotel, this time.’
‘That would be wonderful,’ Maria said. ‘I’ll make some coffee. I feel too sick to eat, but I think I need coffee.’
‘Earl Grey for me.’
They sat at the dining table in the bay window and drank their beverages, saying little and staring out at the trees swaying in the spring breeze.
Mallory’s Humber pulled up fifteen minutes later, followed by a second unmarked police car. Mallory crossed the pavement accompanied by two plainclothes officers. While Maria let them in, Langham fetched the novel and found the letter in his suitcase.
‘Donald,’ Mallory said, his face set solid. This was a side of the detective Langham had not seen before, entirely focused on the endgame. His navy pinstriped suit looked even more dishevelled than usual, as if he’d spent the night in it. He introduced the plainclothes officers as Howson and McNeil from the CID.
They sat at the breakfast table and Maria fetched a tray of tea and joined them. Mallory scanned the relevant pages of Death by the Sea, then passed the book to the CID men.
Mallory clenched a china cup in his big hands, staring at Langham. ‘We considered sending you in first,’ he said, ‘as per what Pearson is obviously expecting.’
Maria took Langham’s hand and opened her mouth to say something, but Mallory went on: ‘But we’re dealing here with someone who’s clearly mentally unhinged, not to say psychopathic. There’s no saying that Pearson would stick to the script.’
Maria squeezed his hand.
‘So we’ll surround the place with undercover men and I’ll send a team into the hotel. We’re taking no risks here. Fortunately the hotel is secluded – a mile up a headland with only one road leading to and from.’
One of the CID men set the book down on the table. ‘We know Pearson will be there, awaiting you. We hold all the aces.’
Mallory stood, his bulk looming in the bay window and occluding the light. ‘I’ll be in touch just as soon as we’ve wrapped it all up, Don.’ He nodded to the CID men and they took their leave.
Langham stood before the window with Maria and watched them drive away.
He looked at her. ‘How do you feel?’
‘I don’t know … Edgy. Nervous. I can’t believe that soon it will be all over. You?’
He smiled. ‘I feel … like you, oddly nervous. And I won’t believe it’s all over until I’ve heard from Jeff. What are you doing today?’
She worried her bottom lip. ‘I really must go into the office.’
‘How about lunch later? I could pick you up at twelve.’
‘That sounds nice. I might feel more like eating by then. What are you doing?’
He thought about how to fill the morning until lunch. ‘I’ll take my things back to the flat. I have a short story that needs finishing. I might look over that for an hour or so.’
It would be beneficial to get back to work, immerse himself in the machinations of imaginary characters and try to forget the events of the past few days.
He carried his case up the front steps, let himself into the flat and stood on the threshold of his study. It was as if he were seeing the room – his writing desk and serried books denoting a sequestered, almost monastic existence – for the first time. Nine years he had lived here, ever since being demobbed; he’d written a dozen books in this room, a hundred short stories … and all he had to show for that industry were the volumes of his own work that filled the bookcase beside the desk. He could not help but contrast what he had back then with what he had now, namely Maria; and he knew that his old self would be shocked that she had relegated his writing, which had consumed his life and thoughts for so long, into second place.
His reverie was interrupted by a knock at the front door. He hurried down, expecting the postman with a parcel too bulky for the letterbox. He pulled open the door.
A small, balding man wrapped in a stained grey mackintosh smiled up at him. ‘Ah, Mr Langham.’
‘Can I help you?’
‘I think you most certainly can.’
Only then did Langham see that the man was holding something.
He looked again at the man’s face – and saw that the artist’s impression had got it right. The fat, the unhealthy pallor, the tiny eyes and the small, vindictive mouth.
Frankie Pearson aimed the pistol directly at Langham’s chest.
He managed, ‘What do you want?’
‘Oh, come, Mr Langham. That’s hardly an original line, is it? A trifle clichéd? Prompted more through fear, I suspect, than genuine enquiry. It sounds as stilted as a line from one of your books. What do you think I want?’
Later it came to him that he should have jumped Pearson there and then, on the threshold in full view of the street, where he might have been more circumspect about shooting. But at the time he was too frozen with shock to think of anything as elemental as survival.
Then the moment was over.
Pearson gestured with the pistol. ‘Turn around and walk up the stairs.’
Langham turned slowly and dragged one foot after the other up the stairs. He heard Pearson enter the hallway and the sound of him kicking the door shut with his heel. He expected to hear the Yale lock click. When the sound failed to reach him, he stored the fact away for possible future use. The door had not shut fully, so if in the next few minutes he were able to overpower Pearson and flee, then he would not have to waste valuable seconds unfastening the catch.
If only he could overpower Pearson, he thought.
He reached the top of the stairs. The only sound he could hear was the thud of his own heartbeat, and when Pearson spoke it seemed to come from a long way away.
‘In there.’
Langham obeyed. He walked into the study and stared at his desk and his books which, just minutes ago, had seemed like the belongings of another person. Now their welcome familiarity seemed, to him, heartbreaking.
‘Sit down at the desk and turn the chair to face me.’
Langham sat down, and when he turned the chair he saw that Pearson had perched himself on the armchair beside the window, holding the pistol in his lap. It would only take him a second to raise it, take aim …
Langham decided to bide his time and hope Pearson wanted to talk.
The little man seemed inordinately happy. ‘You walked into it, Langham.’
The words wrong-footed him. ‘Into what?’
Pearson laughed. He really was a most obnoxious little man. He seemed to have shrunk since the last time they had met, almost ten years ago, and he was also fatter and seedier. His face had the pasty pallor and the rheumy eyes of a seasoned alcoholic.
‘I mean the hotel ruse,’ Pearson said. ‘I couldn’t really lose, could I? Either you went to the hotel like a lamb to the slaughter, having not put two and two together and realized what I was doing, or you worked out my ruse and called in your police chums. All I had to do was keep watch on your little girlfriend’s place this morning and, as soon as I saw Mallory arrive, I knew.’ He smiled. ‘I imagine they’ll be on their way there as we speak. What a surprise they’ll receive when they find a small hotel run by a retired colonel and his wife.’
‘But I spoke—’ Langham began.
‘Of course you spoke to me, but the number you rang wasn’t the hotel’s. Not that you should castigate yourself for not checking. How were you to know of my little plan, after all?’
‘And if we’d not suspected anything and gone to the hotel?’
‘I had a room booked in your name, and I’d booked myself into the neighbouring room. I would have followed you, and …’ He smiled. ‘But now you will die in a different way.’
Langham stared levelly at Pearson. He would have thought that in the situation he would have felt fear. The odd thing was, despite knowing what Pearson intended, he felt calm: he felt not so much fear, he realized, as disbelief that the events would work themselves out in Pearson’s favour.
He was determined to retain his dignity, and smiled at the thought. Maria would have laughed at his typically English, stiff-upper-lip attitude.
‘What is it that you find so funny?’ Pearson enquired. ‘Humour, I assure you, is not at all the appropriate emotion to be feeling now.’
Langham said, as words now were his only weapon, ‘I was thinking how utterly pathetic you are, you and your wasted life: the dreadful hackwork, and now the murder of people better and more talented than yourself.’
‘Dreadful hackwork? I like that. That’s truly rich coming from your lips, the man who made the formulaic detective story his forte. I could never work out your popularity, Langham. Your novels are no better than mine, but I suppose it’s a case of not what you know, but who you know. You got in with that terrible queen Charles Elder, and isn’t one of your editors an old army chum? How could you fail, with friends on the inside to pull the strings?’
Langham smiled, refusing to be drawn. ‘That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Jealousy. Is that why you’re here, Pearson, because you’re envious of my success?’
The small, plump hand holding the gun twitched, and a spasm of irritation crossed Pearson’s face. ‘Jealousy? Do you really think I’m motivated by an emotion as shallow as jealousy? It has nothing to do with jealousy, Langham, but with vengeance – a much more valid motivation, don’t you think?’
Langham shrugged. ‘That, Pearson, is a matter of opinion.’
‘I worked hard at my craft. I worked on my first book for a year, and you can’t even begin to imagine my delight when Elder took me on and found a publisher. And what happened then? Three books down the line, the bastard cut the lifeline, set me adrift …’
Langham said, ‘The books were bad, Pearson. They didn’t sell, and Charles was a businessman. There’s no room for sentimentality in his line of work.’
‘I could have allowed that to set me back, Langham, but I told myself I was better than that. I wouldn’t stop what I loved doing just because some talentless agent didn’t like my work. I sold a dozen books after he dropped me. I proved him wrong.’
How could he be so deluded, Langham wondered; the dozen books he’d sold in the thirties were pseudonymous westerns.
‘And then I struck lucky. My persistence was rewarded. I met Nigel Lassiter. Young Nigel. I had quite a thing for him, at the time. Not that I let him see that – not Nigel, big, bluff, homophobic Nigel. We wrote three good thrillers together, and then he did the dirty, ditched me … and immediately after that Max Sidley turned down my solo effort with a rejection letter so cruel I never forgot a word of it. I even quoted it while killing him.’
Pearson’s eyes glazed over, and a smile came to his lips as if reliving the moment he murdered his ex-editor.
‘But I soldiered on, as you do. I went back to the cowboy books and knocked out half a dozen a year for good old Hubert and Shale. When the war came I was exempted from military service on medical grounds, so I continued writing between periods of fire-watching. Boys’ adventure stories, school stories for the girls’ annuals – I churned it out, no keeping me down. Then I made a lucky contact after the war, met an old school chum who worked as an editor for Pritchard. They were looking to start a line of detective stories, and I thought here I go, a second chance at respectability … They took a couple, which sold reasonably well, and were about to commission another two when Gervaise Cartwright’s vitriolic review of the second book came out and scuppered any chance of that deal.’
Langham couldn’t help smiling. ‘You’re looking for excuses, Pearson, and people to blame. The bad review did nothing to queer the deal, if you’ll excuse the phrase. Do you think Pritchard would have given a damn about what Cartwright wrote, however critical?’
Pearson stared at him. ‘It certainly didn’t help.’
Langham said, ‘Your pride was hurt – admit it. No one likes bad reviews.’
Pearson looked around the study, at the ranked books, the watercolours, and his gaze alighted on the row of Langham’s titles on the bookcase beside the desk. He said, ‘So I went back to Hubert and Shale like a kicked dog.’
Langham stared at the little man and was surprised to see tears in his eyes.
‘And do you know the one person who stood by me during all those years? Who believed in me and my novels? My agent, good old Dorothy. She was a stalwart, finding me work during the lean years, constantly reassuring me, fighting my corner. She believed in me.’
She pitied you, Langham thought, and she wanted her seven-and-a-half per cent.
‘And then, in ’forty-seven, I had another break. A deal for Wilkins to produce three whodunits with the promise of more if they sold … And what happened?’
‘Let me guess. They didn’t sell?’
‘And why was that?’
Because they were truly terrible, Langham thought, but bit his tongue. ‘You tell me.’
He saw it coming. Pearson pointed at him with his free hand. ‘Because you, you self-serving, vindictive bastard, wrote a review of the second book so vile, so cutting, that the director of Wilkins hauled my editor over the coals and asked him how the novel came to be published by his company. And the upshot was that the third book was cancelled and I was out on my arse again.’
Langham leaned forward and said, ‘And I stand by every word of that review. It was a bad review because it was a bad book.’
Without warning Pearson raised the gun and fired.
What was so shocking about the gesture was that Pearson pulled the trigger in sudden, splenetic fury, and the bullet could have gone anywhere.
Langham felt a dull blow in his lower leg, not so much a pain as a sudden, intense ache, and when he looked down he saw blood soaking into the carpet beside his shoe.
He looked up. Pearson was shaking, holding the gun in both hands, aiming directly at Langham’s chest.
‘The next one … the next one will be in your heart.’
Langham told himself that if he didn’t move, if he kept very still, then the pain would remain at a tolerable level, a mere ache. He glanced down at his foot, surrounded now in a slick of dark blood, and he knew that if an artery had been hit in his lower leg he would die from blood loss in a matter of minutes.
‘I soldiered on over the next few years, as you do. I lived from one measly contract to the next, picking up work where I could. When I look back, I wonder how I managed to keep body and soul together.’ He shrugged. ‘I put it down to dogged persistence, a belief in the worth of my work …’
Langham closed his eyes and tried not to laugh.
Pearson was saying, ‘And then six months ago Hubert and Shale decided to drop their line of westerns, and suddenly I had no more commissions, nothing more to write, and … and what would I do without my writing?’
Langham gritted his teeth against the mounting pain that pulsed up his leg. He stared across the room at Pearson. The man was crying now, weeping real tears as he lowered the gun to his lap.
The phone rang, startling him with the fact that there was an ordinary, sane world out there and that someone wished to speak to him. Instinctively he reached out and picked it up.
Pearson snapped, ‘Drop it, Langham!’
He dropped it, and the receiver clattered into the cradle.
Pearson nodded, licked his lips and resumed. ‘A few days after Hubert and Shale dropped me, I remembered your review. I dug it out and read it again, and that reminded me of all the others, and I unearthed Cartwright’s hatchet job.’ He smiled then, almost beatifically. ‘And it came to me, just as the plot of a mystery novel comes to me – a series of murders that would rid the city of vile and disreputable scum.’
‘You’re mad,’ Langham whispered to himself.
‘And as I mulled the idea over, more ideas came, neat twists and turns, worthy of my very best efforts. Why not, I thought, kill my tormentors by methods used by the murderers in my own books? How novel, how fitting … And I used another neat trick from one of my books. A dead man cannot commit murder, can he? So I found someone not dissimilar to myself, someone who would not be missed by family and friends, because he did not have family and friends – a homeless tramp I befriended and even gave my old clothes to. Then I got him blind drunk one night, drove down to Kent and arranged him on the London line with my papers in his pockets.’
He paused, smiling at Langham as if awaiting a round of applause.
Langham looked down at his foot. The pool of blood, he thought, appeared not to be getting any larger. Perhaps he’d been lucky and the bullet hadn’t hit an artery.
‘Max Sidley was easy,’ Pearson went on. ‘He hadn’t heard about my “death”, and he let me into his house when I called with the news, spurious of course, about the sudden illness of one of his co-editors at Douglas and Dearing. He was a weak old thing and he put up no resistance when I dealt with him.’
Langham stared at Pearson. ‘With a drill …’ he said.
Pearson smiled. ‘A method derived from one of my very best novels, Death in the Night.’
‘Sick,’ Langham said.
Pearson waved this away and continued, ‘Gervaise Cartwright was an especial pleasure, Langham. I’d never liked the man’s cruel little columns, even before he penned that poison review of my novel. I posed as an avid reader wanting him to sign one of his books, and he was only too willing to oblige. I slipped the stiletto into his back while he sat at his desk – and the hood was a little touch I thought might amuse those in the know.
‘I took great delight in planning the death of Charles Elder because he began it all, many years ago. He showed me hope, then withdrew it, and I always found him a conceited snob. You should have seen his face when I turned up at his country pile. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost – little Frankie Pearson, back from the dead. I must admit that he recovered from his shock and was the perfect host.’
‘You intended to make it look like suicide?’ Langham said.
‘As per my novel Murder in the Mansion, yes. But then you and your little French floozy turned up and spoiled my fun.’
Langham said, gaining satisfaction from the words, ‘You didn’t kill him, Pearson. Charles is going to pull through.’
The little man’s cruel lips lifted in a smile. ‘Then I shall have to make doubly sure that, next time, I succeed.’
‘If there is a next time,’ Langham muttered.
Pearson chose to ignore the remark.
Langham said, ‘And Alexander Southern and Amelia Hampstead? What grudge did you bear them?’
Pearson smiled. ‘Southern was a reader for Gollancz in the late thirties, and he advised them not to touch what I thought then was my best novel to date. So he had to die. I drove down to the village where he lived near Canterbury and watched him for a few days. He was a creature of habit, and liked to take a quiet afternoon stroll. In one of my novels an old major is killed by a hit-and-run driver, a method I employed to great effect with Southern.’
‘And you killed Fellowes because he gave you a bad review?’
‘With his own silver stiletto award,’ Pearson said. ‘A method taken from one of my more recent titles. The old boy put up quite a fight.’
He paused, then went on: ‘And I would have successfully drowned Dame Amelia in her own moat – from my Death at the Castle – had it not been for her damned hound …’ He held up his left hand, and for the first time Langham made out the bandage wrapped around his wrist.
‘What on earth did you have against Amelia?’
‘She blocked my election to the Professional Crime Writers’ Association in the early forties, on account that she thought my work “sub-standard”, as she later told a friend – a slight for which I never forgave her.’
Langham closed his eyes. His lower leg felt as if a red-hot poker was being stabbed into the muscle with agonizing regularity. He wondered if he would pass out, and fought against it: if he slipped into unconsciousness now, then who knew what sadistic pleasures Pearson might exact?
‘But Nigel Lassiter was the best. I really enjoyed what I did to old Nigel,’ Pearson said, almost reminiscently. ‘The look on his face when I turned up at the cottage … He had already discovered the grave, having found the front door locked and wandered around to the back garden. I approached him from behind and cleared my throat. Oh, how he jumped! And jumped again when he saw that it was I. And jumped a third time, backwards this time, when I shot him through the chest with a crossbow, a device I used in …’
Langham stopped him with a raised hand. ‘Spare me the details, Pearson.’
‘And now,’ Pearson went on, ‘now it comes to you. The element of surprise is no more, but there will be something about my killing of you that will give me more satisfaction than any of the others. Perhaps because I despise your work the most, perhaps because your review cut the deepest.’
He pulled something from the inside pocket of his mackintosh, and Langham saw that it was a copy of the Capital Crime magazine, the very one which carried his review of Death on the Farm.
Pearson opened the magazine and smiled across at Langham. Then he began to read. ‘“The plot is ramshackle, and so patched together with authorial convenience as to be laughable …”’ Pearson looked up. ‘Rather like your own novels, no? How about this: “Even the lead character is so flat as to be one-dimensional.” And then your parting shot – did you think yourself oh so clever when penning this, Langham: ‘“Death on the Farm is on every level a turkey”?’ Pearson smiled, almost sadly. ‘Do you regret what you said, Langham?’
A retraction, at the eleventh hour, would do nothing to placate the madman. He said, ‘I stand by every word, Pearson. More, I could have been crueller.’
‘Really, Langham? Then perhaps you will regret never again being able to have the chance …’ Pearson tore the pages from the magazine and wadded them into a tight ball.
‘This will be my finest work, Mr Langham. The critic eats his words. You will open your mouth and eat these pages and then I will take great delight in shooting you.’
Langham made himself laugh.
‘Oh, you find that amusing, Langham?’
‘What I find amusing is that to kill me you’ll have to deviate from your master plan. This scenario was never envisaged in any of your potboilers.’
Pearson smiled, revealing a collection of yellowed teeth. ‘Ah, but that’s where you are very wrong, Mr Langham. Very wrong indeed. You see, I am working on a novel right now, and I rather fancy that the final scene will be a rendition of our little tête-à-tête, with the critic eating his words before his brains are blown out. I shall enjoy writing that scene … I shall enjoy writing it very much.’
Langham recalled something. ‘Which is why you didn’t shoot me at the mill, when you had the chance …’
‘Oh, I was tempted, Langham, sorely tempted. But that would have spoiled my fun.’ He laughed. ‘I will very much savour writing the final scene … but even more enjoyable will be the day I submit it under an assumed name to the Charles Elder agency, and then sit back and think of your little French piece reading it.’
Hardly before he knew what he was doing, Langham pushed himself from the chair in rage and dived across the room. Startled, Pearson stood and fired. Langham felt something impact with his torso, a great blow that at once winded him and sent him sprawling on to his back.
He lay staring up at the ceiling, thinking about Maria and wishing that things could have been very, very different.
He was only dimly aware of Pearson as he strode across the room and stared down at him, smiling.