CHAPTER VI

7+13 = 20

NIGEL GLANCED AT the sheet of paper on the arm of his chair. It was his practice during an investigation to jot down anything done or said by those concerned which had struck him as out of character, self-betraying, contradictory, cryptic, or in some other way significant: not because, with his phenomenal memory, he would forget them but because, committed to paper, these random and heterogeneous items sometimes formed chemical associations, as it were, and created the beginnings of a pattern.

PIERS LOUDRON: “My dear boy, at my age, and when one’s tenure of life is unlikely to be long protracted, one feels the need—not exactly for confession—but for the drawing up of a balance-sheet . . . My diary is giving me quite a new interest in life. It may even prolong it!”

JAMES LOUDRON: A very heavy eater—insecurity, or energy? “If I’d wanted to destroy evidence, I could have done it any time in the last ten days.”

HAROLD LOUDRON: In reply to Walter’s suggestion that Piers might have gone along after dinner to see Harold and Sharon—“She wasn’t—— what the hell d’you mean, to see us!” . . . Wasn’t at home?

REBECCA LOUDRON: Her account of going with Graham to look for their father—why does this stick in my mind?

Also, “we were playing the clarinet quintet and some piano concertos the night when——”

GRAHAM LOUDRON: According to Rebecca, described the atmosphere at dinner the night his father disappeared as “papa was waiting for something to happen.”

And what was he doing across the river so early on Saturday morning?

WALTER BARN: Not just the clown—one look enough for me.

Nigel read through the notes. Then, after a pause, took out his pen and wrote beneath them: 7+13 =20: 1960 – 20 = 1940: cf. Em’s statement that during the 1940 blitzes P.L. acted “like he didn’t care whether he lived or died.”

A car stopped outside. Going to the window, Nigel saw it was a police car, and observed his old friend, Chief Inspector Wright of the Yard’s C Division, get out. Wright looked more than ever like a film director—lantern-jawed face, horn-rimmed spectacles, alert, darting eyes. Nigel brought him into the studio, where Clare kissed him warmly. In her presence, Wright loved to give an exaggerated performance of the bumbling middlebrow, the man who knows what he likes. He bent a cautious look upon the Female Nude.

“Well, you’ve got something there,” he opined. “Massive and concrete.”

“You should hear what my char says about it.”

“Don’t tell me! I know.” Wright went outside, re-entered the studio with a heavy, bunioned gait, apprehensively circled the Female Nude. “Gruesome, ain’t it? Gives yer the creeps. Do I ’ave to dust that?”

Clare’s laughter pealed out. “I’ll get some drinks.”

“So they’ve sent for the Murder Squad,” said Nigel.

“Your D.D.I.’s a first-rate man; but he’s got too much on his plate just now. A wave of theft at the docks. And there’s a mob of teds terrorising the respectable residents of Shooters Hill—but can Henderson get any witnesses to come forward?—‘You were at home, sir, yesterday evening when a gang of youths broke every window in the multiple stores opposite your house’?—‘Yes, but I didn’t see or hear nothing, didn’t pay no attention.’ Here lies the dear old British Public, and the epitaph on its tombstone is, ‘I don’t want to have nothing to do with that.’ And then they’ve had a buzz that there’s a drug-distributing racket shifted its base to just across the river—our Narcotics boys are working on that with Henderson. Thank you, Miss Massinger, just a touch of cyanide and plenty of soda.”

The sound of the St. Alfege bells ringing for Sunday Evensong could be distinctly heard.

“To heaven or to hell,” said Wright. “I’ve just had a long talk with Henderson, and he’s given me acres of bumf for my homework to-night. So you’ve got your foot in the door again, Strangeways?”

“Yes. Are you and the D.D.I. convinced it’s murder?”

“Hey, what’s this? The family bribing you to prove it suicide or something?” The chief inspector’s tone was gently mocking, but his eyes on Nigel were sharp as dressed flints.

“Well, did you ever hear of someone being murdered by severing his wrist arteries? The jugular, yes. But——”

“There’s got to be a first time for everything.”

“And, even if the old man died quickly of shock, there’d be a hell of a lot of blood. But there are no traces of it anywhere in the house or annexe or garden.”

“Which makes the suicide theory even more impossible than the murder one.”

“I know. So far as his own house is concerned. It looks as if it must have happened somewhere else.”

“Why?” said Clare dreamily.

“Why? But don’t you see——?”

“The Romans used to do it in their bath. Cut their arteries. Suppose Dr. Piers did just that. And bled to death. And someone ran the water out of the bath. There’d be no trace—not if you wiped the bath round afterwards.”

Wright was gazing at her keenly, his eyes sparking.

“But if that’s how it happened, why should the person who found him dead go to the trouble and danger of putting him in the river?”

“And if he was murdered in his bath,” said Nigel, “he would have been killed in that way to make it look like suicide. So, again, why throw the body in the river?”

“And why remove one of his cut-throat razors?” asked Wright. “Why not leave the weapon beside him in the bath?”

“The sleeping-draught could work either way, I suppose. The murderer gives it to him at dinner to make him go upstairs early—to his bedroom adjoining a bathroom—and soften him up. Or Dr. Piers might have taken it himself, after dinner, to dull the suicide process.”

Curled up on the sofa, Clare shivered delicately like a cat. “I think it’s all perfectly horrible. I doubt if one could wholly approve of Dr. Piers, but at least he was someone—he stood out.” She sighed, then added, “Don’t suicides generally leave notes?”

“The missing diary pages might have constituted a suicide note. Has the D.D.I. had any luck with them?”

“There are two sets of fingerprints,” Wright answered. “Both on the left-hand page facing the first missing page. One lot are Dr. Piers’s: the other will probably be Dr. James Loudron’s—we’re taking his to-morrow, and everyone else’s in the family and household. The pages were ripped out, not cut out.” He pantomimed, bending wide open an imaginary exercise book with the fingers of his left hand while tearing out pages with the other. “You see, it should leave a very strong thumb-print on the left-hand page. But there isn’t one: only faint marks. What does that suggest?” The C.I.D. man had developed a habit of shooting such questions at his subordinates; it was part of their education, and kept them up to the mark.

“Gloves, of course,” Nigel replied. “And you would hardly wear gloves to tear pages out of a book unless those pages incriminated you.”

“Incriminated you for what?”

Nigel smiled. “You’re trying to edge me over to the murder theory. But Jack the Book-Ripper could have had other reasons.”

“Such as what?”

“For example, he might prefer that his fingerprints should not be found on the book, supposing that he planned to use those missing pages as a lever against someone else.”

“Oh lord! Don’t start bringing blackmail in now. Isn’t one crime enough for you?” Wright jumped impatiently to his feet, strode over to a shelf which held a herd of the little archaic clay horses, with spout-like muzzles, that were Clare’s form of doodling. “We’re doing what I’m always on at my chaps not to do—theorising without enough facts.” He took up one of the horses, gave it an imaginary lump of sugar, and put it down again. “Murder cases are solved by dozens of men in macintoshes going into thousands of houses and asking tens of thousands of people a few simple questions. Not,” he continued, moving over to Nigel’s chair and stubbing his finger on the sheet of paper, “not by doing abstract equations. ‘7+13=20: 1960–20=1940’—what the devil’s this in aid of?”

“Not so abstract, my dear fellow. It struck me as odd that, if those missing pages are in fact Dr. Piers’s diary, he should have used his 1940 case-book for it instead of his 1960 one, which has plenty of blank pages. Did the year 1940 have some special meaning for him? Well, he was a hero in the blitzes, by all accounts—and a desperate hero.”

“I dare say. But what’s this ‘7+13=20’?”

“Rebecca Loudron told me that Graham Loudron was adopted by Dr. Piers, at the age of thirteen, seven years ago. So he was born in 1940.”

“So?”

“So I don’t know what. Perhaps I’m becoming a number-fetishist.”

“I’d stick to shoes, if I were you.”

“Has it occurred to anyone,” asked Clare after a pause, “that Graham’s adoption was a bit peculiar?”

“In what way?” said Wright.

“Well, we are told his father was Dr. Piers’s best friend and killed in the war. Why did Dr. Piers wait till 1953 to adopt him? Because Graham’s mother was alive till then? Possibly, but we don’t know when she died. And wasn’t it rather excessive to adopt him?—I mean, for a rather selfish and patriarchal man like the doctor? The Jews set such store by their own flesh and blood. I’m surprised he didn’t just take Graham into his house, educate him and so on, without making him one of the family and giving him his name.”

“I’m not,” said Nigel.

Clare opened her dark eyes wide at him.

“You see, I strongly suspect Graham is Dr. Piers’s real son. Rebecca has a photograph of her father on honeymoon with his wife in the early twenties. And there’s a distinct resemblance between the young Piers and Graham.”

“Do you suppose his—any of the family know this?”

Nigel shrugged his shoulders. “No idea. But they’d better not know that we suspect it. If it’s true, it would account for Piers’s rather strange action in adopting a boy soon after his wife died. He couldn’t while she was alive, either because it would be bad taste or because she knew about his peccadillo. Or, of course, both.”

“Well,” said Chief Inspector Wright, “that’s an interesting little bit of home chat. I don’t see what bearing it could have on the case, but you follow it up if you like. Just your line. The mad archæologist. Loves digging up the past. I must go and do some work. Thank you kindly for the drink, ma’am.”

“Just a moment. I suggest you get the Fraud Squad to look discreetly into Harold Loudron’s affairs. I——”

“It’s being done. Henderson’s idea. Any further instructions?” Wright grinned cockily at Nigel.

“Yes, you hard-faced servant of Loranorder. Tell your Narcotics chums that Mrs. Harold Loudron is, or recently has been, a drug addict. Also—no, perhaps not.”

“Yes? Don’t clam up on me. All contributions gratefully received.”

“Well, I fancy that there’s some kind of complicity between Mrs. Harold and Graham. I noticed it after dinner there one night—the first time we met the family. It may be just that they’re bed-mates, but it didn’t feel like that.”

“Very instructive, I’m sure.”

“In his short career, Graham has been for brief periods a pianist in a jazz band and a cook at the Seamen’s Hospital here.”

“Ah. Now you’re talking. Lascars smuggling in hemp, eh? And night-club hot-number types tend to coke themselves up. Any dirt on other characters involved?”

“I’m not prepared to release it at present.”

“Hoity-toity.”

“I like to pan my dirt, in case there’s some gold in it. And that’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say ‘hoity-toity’ since a scholarly great-aunt of mine rebuked me, at the age of fourteen, for putting her right on a quotation she’d made from a chorus in the Trachiniae.”

“I can just hear you doing it.”

For some time, after Wright had left and they had finished their bacon-and-egg supper, Nigel and Clare talked over the mystery of Dr. Piers Loudron. Clare’s fingers worked on a lump of clay they were shaping, of their own volition, into a spout-muzzled horse, while she gave all her attention to the problem Nigel worried at.

“Let’s forget for the moment,” he was saying, “the question of murder v. suicide. Take the hypothesis that it was in his own house he killed himself or was killed. How could the body have been conveyed to the river? He was frail and weighed little, but one can’t imagine X carrying him there in a sack or trundling him in a wheel-barrow: too dangerous, even allowing for the fog: too bizarre altogether.”

“So he must have been conveyed in a car.”

“Exactly. But Henderson’s chaps have been over Dr. Piers’s Daimler and Dr. James’s Morris with all the resources of science, and they found no trace of the body’s having been carried, either inside the cars or in their luggage boots.”

“Yes, but what trace would they be able to find? X could have bandaged the wrists, so there’d be no bloodstains left; and anyway he’d have stopped bleeding by then.”

“Hair,” said Nigel. “You couldn’t bundle a body into a boot or a back seat without rubbing off a hair or two.”

“Not if you’d wrapped that tweed overcoat of his round the head?”

“Ye-es. That might work.”

Clare’s eyes lit up. “No, I’ve got it! Something much simpler. If X used Dr. Piers’s Daimler and set the body beside him on the front seat, it wouldn’t matter if the police found hairs there—or any other traces of him except blood. You’d expect to find them in a car he was constantly using.”

“Good. You may have hit it. The only alternative I could think of is that X borrowed for the job one of the cars that are parked every night in Burney Street. But, unless he’s a professional car thief, he wouldn’t have been able to break into one of them without causing damage, which the owner would have reported to the police. Well then, let’s imagine X going off with the body in the front seat of the Daimler. Where would he take it?”

“In that fog, he’d not drive far, surely. The nearest point on the river is by the pier.”

“But you can’t drive right up to the river wall there. You’d have to hump the body nearly a hundred yards, past the Cutty Sark.”

“Well then, the next nearest point is Park Row, the road that runs past the east end of the Naval College. X could stop the car on the opposite side from the Trafalgar Tavern, and he’d only have to take about ten paces to the waterside.”

“Yes. There’s a street lamp there. But in that fog it’d be fairly safe, unless someone walked out of the Trafalgar Tavern just as X was dumping the body in the river,” said Nigel slowly. “It might be safer still to drive down one of the streets which lead to the river farther east. The wharves would be absolutely deserted, I should think, at that time. There’s Lassell Street to the west of Harold Loudron’s house, and Pelton Road which runs down just east of it to Lovell’s Wharf. All this presumes special knowledge on X’s part.”

“Of Greenwich?”

“Yes, and of the tide-table. It’d have been unwise to throw the body off the river wall at any time except high water or the top of the ebb, if you wanted it to be pulled out from the shore.”

“But if X merely wanted to get rid of the body—so that it wasn’t found in the house?”

“Then he’d surely not have needed to take it as far as the river. There’s all that waste ground along Burney Street, for instance. No, the fact that the body was thrown in the river suggests that X wanted its discovery to be put off as long as possible.”

“So that it might be difficult to prove how Dr. Piers died?”

“Exactly. And if the ship’s screw had cut off his arms instead of his legs, we should never have known how he died.”

Clare Massinger stretched out her legs on the sofa and gazed at the lofty ceiling. “If it was murder, all I can say is that X was very lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“To get a combination of thick fog and high tide at the right time, and the several members of the family dispersed in different rooms.”

“Lucky or patient. He may have waited a long time for that combination of circumstances: including Mrs. Hyams’s confinement, which kept Dr. James out of the house for several hours that night.”

“I suppose you’re safe to assume he died that night, or in the small hours of the morning?”

“Pretty safe, if it was in his own house he died. But there’s no absolute certainty that he did. He may have had what Harold calls a ‘brainstorm,’ and wandered out after the effects of the sedative had worn off, and somehow remained in concealment for a period until—— But it’s so unlikely, one can dismiss it. No, the other possibility I have to consider is that he left the house that night, perfectly in his right mind——”

“But having changed his suit, shirt and underclothes,” Clare interrupted. “Why?”

“Yes, I know that sounds wildly improbable, but pass it over. It couldn’t have been an emergency call, for his doctor’s bag was not taken. The only thing I can imagine taking him out of the house on a foggy night like that would be an appeal from one of his family. Harold Loudron did ring him up before dinner: Dr. Piers was heard to say it could wait till to-morrow. Well, he might have changed his mind——”

“After sleeping on it for several hours with the aid of a barbiturate?” asked Clare sceptically.

“. . . might have changed his mind and gone along to Harold’s house.”

“But surely, at his age, he wouldn’t? He’d have rung Harold and discussed whatever it was on the telephone, or asked him to come over to Crooms Hill.”

“Dr. Piers was not too old, I suspect, to act on an impulse—irrationally, even. Well, he walks along to Harold’s house——”

“Remembering to take a cut-throat razor with him.”

“Oh, blast you, Clare! Let me finish building my house of cards before you blow it down. There’s no evidence that the missing razor had not been removed from its case days or weeks before.”

“All right. So the old man gets to Harold’s house, and then what?”

“If it turns out that Harold’s business affairs are rocky, and if his father refuses him the money needed to straighten them out, Harold has a strong motive for killing him. And what’s more, he has an extremely convenient window, right above the water, from which to jettison the body.”

“There’s a king-size snag in that,” said Clare.

“Oh, there is, is there?”

“Don’t be grumpy. Suppose Harold is in such a desperate hurry for money, surely he’d not dispose of his father’s body in such a way that it might not be found for weeks? He’d want to borrow on the strength of his expectations from the old man’s will immediately. And anyway, what’s the fair Sharon doing while Harold is cutting his father’s arteries—encouraging him with high-pitched cries?”

“You’re impossible to-night, love. Actually, I suspect she was out on the tiles that night. Harold said something when I was talking to the family this morning, which—and he got very hot under the collar when Walter Barn suggested that Dr. Piers might have gone to see him and Sharon that night. Still, I dare say it’s all got some fairly innocent explanation. Perhaps we’d better stick to the Daimler——”

When Chief Inspector Wright turned up after breakfast the next morning, Nigel at once said to him:

“Before you start interrogating the suspects, I think it might be worth while getting one of your chaps to make inquiries in the Trafalgar Tavern and in the houses at the north end of Pelton Road and possibly Lassell Street.”

“And what is he to inquire about?” asked Wright, with an exaggeratedly blank expression.

“Whether anyone saw Dr. Piers’s Daimler standing at the river end of the street on the night he disappeared.”

Wright’s poker-face registered a faint stir of emotion.

“Interesting you should say that. I had a man interviewing the residents of the Trafalgar Tavern last night. One of them—he’s been away for the last week and only just returned—remembered seeing a Daimler which he recognised as the doctor’s, at about 11.15 that night. This gentleman had popped out to give his dog a bit of relief before going to bed. The car was standing, empty, on the opposite side of the street, about ten yards from the waterfront. Our witness strolled across the road and all but bumped into the car, the fog was so thick. And now,” added Wright, “would you mind telling me just how you lighted upon this information?”

“By theorising on insufficient facts,” Nigel replied.