CHAPTER VII

Chain Reactions

AS THE POLICE car drew up outside the Loudrons’ house, the front door opened and a body flew out into the paved forecourt, followed by a camera which smashed itself against the iron railings. Wright and Nigel hurried through the wrought-iron gate. A dazed little man, with blood pouring from his nose and a vicious, frightened look in his eye, picked himself up.

“He’s gone mad,” the man panted. “I’ll have the law on him! He can’t treat the Press like this.”

Wright and his sergeant began dusting the man off. Nigel rang the front-door bell: then, hearing sounds of violence from within, moved to the window of the study. Looking in, he saw Walter Barn in the process of beating up a fattish man a good head taller than himself. Rebecca Loudron, her back to a book-case on the far side of the room, was watching the massacre with an expression in which horror and a fascinated excitement unpleasingly blended. If Walt had ever heard of the Queensberry Rules, he had forgotten what he had heard. Slipping a wild right swing, he drove his fist into his opponent’s belly, well below the belt; then, while the large man caved forward, making a hideous sound as if his guts were falling out of his mouth, Walt clubbed him across the cheek with his right, and followed it up with a brutal kick at the knee-cap. The man sprawled backwards across the desk. Hammering at the window, Nigel at last attracted Rebecca’s attention. She ran out of the room to open the front door. Nigel rushed in, followed by Wright, the sergeant and the Press photographer.

The large man was rolling on the floor now, whimpering and retching, forearms cradling his head at which Walt was kicking. In a moment the frail-looking Wright had Walter Barn’s powerful arm in a lock that made the young painter bend forward, gasping with pain. He pushed him down into a chair, sent Rebecca scurrying for iodine and dressings, helped his sergeant to lift Walter’s victim on to the sofa, turned back to his assailant.

“I am a police officer. What’s been going on here?”

Walter Barn’s demoniac fit had passed away as suddenly as a summer hail-storm. He lay back in the chair, his speedwell-blue eyes dancing.

“These two bastards were making a nuisance of themselves. They insulted Becky.”

“That’s a damned lie,” exclaimed the little photographer in an aggrieved, adenoidal whine. “We were only doing our duty. We asked for an interview with Miss Loudron, an exclusive, and this maniac here——”

“Asked for an interview! You lousy little gutterpress lapdog! What you mean is, you and that fat slob on the sofa there got your foot in the door, pushed your way in past my fiancée, started photographing this study, badgered my fiancée for what you call a ‘story’——”

“You’ve no call to use violence. D’you realise you’ve broken a valuable camera?”

“I’m delighted to hear it. Your sort make me sick. You think that, because you’re in the pay of some revolting Press-lord, you’ve a right to force your way into anyone’s house and exploit people’s grief to cook up a tasty story for your sickening readers——”

“The public,” mouthed the large man, who had painfully gathered himself into a sitting position on the sofa, “has a right to be informed on all matters of general interest. You’re going to be sorry for this, young man, whoever you are. We shall deal with you.”

“God damn you and your public! Hasn’t the private individual any rights?” Walter Barn, quivering now like a taut wire, spoke with such violence that the fat man shrank back and Wright interposed.

“All right. Break it up.”

“What makes me vomit is the bloody sanctimonious hypocrisy of muck-rakers like that hero trembling on the sofa there, telling us about their sacred duty to provide dollops of sewage for the moronic millions, and——”

“I said, break it up,” Wright’s voice was cold as a chisel. Rebecca came in with a first-aid box. “Will you attend to him?” said Wright.

“I wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole,” answered Rebecca, her nostrils wide with distaste.

“And you a doctor’s daughter!” mocked Walter.

“Sergeant, attend to this man. You’re a great nuisance, all of you,” Wright equably continued. “Wasting my time with your squabbles like this.”

“Are you in charge of the case now?” the large man asked him, while the sergeant applied iodine and a lint dressing to his split cheek. “Anything fresh broken? Can you give me a story?”

“Smut-hound still on the trail,” Walter remarked.

“Keep your wit to yourself,” said Wright. “I’ll take statements from you two representatives of the Press, then you will leave. I’m busy to-day.”

Ten minutes later, Nigel, Wright and the sergeant were alone in the study with Walter Barn.

“God-damned liars,” said the young painter. “They did push their way in and they did molest Becky.”

“How do you know? According to your statement, you did not arrive till later.”

“Becky told me when I came in. And lucky I did. She was terribly upset.”

“How did you get in?”

“Through the door.”

“Now look, Mr. Barn. I’ve no time to waste on childish repartee. You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Oh, all right. I let myself in. I have a key.”

“How long have you had it?”

“Becky gave me one—oh, a month or two ago.”

“Right. Now we’re going back to the night Dr. Piers Loudron disappeared. I understand you visited this house before dinner?”

“What the nobs call ‘dinner,’ yes. About 6.30. I chatted with Becky in the kitchen for half an hour or so: then I walked back to my humble abode.”

“Had you any special reason for visiting Miss Loudron that night?”

“Just lerv, Inspector. Can’t seem to keep away from the girl.”

“You walked a mile, in a thick fog, and a mile back, simply to have a chat?”

“Beneath a rugged exterior, I’m ever so romantic.”

Chief Inspector Wright, appearing satisfied, dropped this subject. Nigel had often witnessed his interrogations, but was still fascinated by Wright’s technique—a technique of suspect-tapping, one might call it; as a man might move round a room, tapping the walls for the hollow sound which would betray a hiding-place, so Wright probed here and there at the surface of the person he was interrogating, his senses alert for a suspect’s relaxing of tension when he moved away from a dangerous area, a tightening of tension when he returned to it. Had Mr. Barn ever been in the surgery?—no. Did he remember any more of the telephone conversation between Dr. Piers and Harold Loudron than he had told the D.D.I.?—no. Could he drive a car?—probably, but he’d only ridden motor bikes so far. Would he make any objections to having his fingerprints taken?—none at all.

“Did you ever quarrel with the deceased?”

“No. He just froze me off—or tried to.”

“Because you wished to marry his daughter?”

“Yes. He treated me like something the cat brought in.”

“So Miss Loudron had to do the fighting?”

Pause. Walter Barn’s eyes looked wary. “I don’t get you.”

“She had serious quarrels with her father, over you?”

“Well, I—yes, she did.”

“And a particularly violent one the evening he disappeared—not long before you turned up?”

“Who the hell told you that?”

“Information received,” Wright blandly answered. Nigel sat up. This was news to him. Or was the inspector flying a kite?

“If you knew it already, why ask me?” said Walter.

“We have to check and counter-check every bit of evidence. Is it true?”

“There was a quarrel that day. I don’t know how violent. I wasn’t in attendance.”

“But surely you do? That’s why you walked over here in the fog. Miss Loudron had telephoned you. She needed your help, your comfort, urgently?”

The painter made no reply, and Wright did not press him. Instead, he put a few dummy questions about Dr. Piers—had Mr. Barn felt him to have been apprehensive, or unusually depressed, recently?—no: he wouldn’t know anyway. With the perfunctory air of one asking a merely routine question, Wright said:

“So you left the house that night about seven, and walked straight home? You didn’t go out again?”

Nigel, for whom Walter Barn’s small round head perched on his square shoulders had always seemed like a stone ball on a manorial gate-pillar, now suddenly saw it as a ball not cemented there but precariously balanced, as if a puff of wind might roll it off.

“No, I didn’t go out again.” There was a queer intonation, a sort of smirk, in Walter’s voice.

“You were here all the time?” put in Nigel, so unobtrusively that it was barely audible.

“That’s what I’m—” Walter stopped, and almost instantly went on—“what I’m telling you is, I went back to my studio and had supper and looked through a Piero della Francesca book Becky had lent me, and then I went to bed.”

“You live alone?” asked Wright, his eyes boring into Walter.

“Yes.”

“So we have to take your word for it that you went home and stayed there all night?”

“I suppose you do. But why shouldn’t you? You don’t think I croaked the old man, do you?”

“Well, that’ll be all for the present. We’ll just take your fingerprints.”

When this had been done and the sergeant sent to fetch Rebecca Loudron, Nigel said to Wright:

“This alleged quarrel between Dr. Piers and his daughter—were you inventing it?”

“Inventing? Certainly not,” Wright replied rather curtly. “Graham Loudron gave it in evidence to the D.D.I.”

“He did, did he? And did Miss Loudron admit it?”

“She agreed there’d been a row, yes. Played it down a bit, though.”

“And Walter Barn may not have left this house that night?”

“Yes. You caught him out very neatly there.”

Nigel gazed non-committally at the inspector. “Do you see her as a Lady Macbeth? a parricidal Lady Macbeth?”

Before Wright could answer, Rebecca Loudron came in. The sergeant returned to his hard chair and unobtrusively took out his shorthand note-book. Rebecca had this new look of maturity still, but there was a glaze of uneasiness over it, which did not escape Wright’s notice.

“I’m sorry to be badgering you, Miss Loudron—particularly after the distressing ordeal you had this morning.”

“Will they make trouble for Walt? They were horrible. Can they have him arrested for—whatever it’s called—assault and battery?”

Wright smiled at her. “Technically, they could sue him, yes. But I doubt if they will. Depends whether their paper decides it’d be good publicity. It’d mean washing some dirty linen in court. But of course I shall have to make a report to your local police about it. Incidentally, was there no one in the house who could have helped you to deal with them?”

“Well, James was having a surgery. And Graham—I don’t know where he was: I called out to him, but he didn’t come.”

The inspector gently sounded Rebecca about the quarrel with her father; but he did not seem to get any further than the D.D.I. had done, judging by his reception of her answers, in which there showed clearly a conflict between loyalty to the dead and resentment at her father’s attitude towards Walter and herself. Nigel studied the woman’s face and manner: the strong nose, the fine, slightly protuberant brown eyes, the heavy eyebrows; the odd mixture of gaucheness and dignity. Suddenly her woman’s nature broke through the web of Wright’s interrogation.

“Why are you asking me all these questions? Everyone knows Papa and I quarrelled a lot about Walt.” Her lips quivered, then set firmly. “Do you really think I could—could kill Papa because he wouldn’t let me marry Walt?”

Wright looked at her with surprise and respect. He said, lightly, at his most charming, “I expect you often felt like doing it.”

Rebecca returned his gaze, shocked for a moment by Wright’s unofficial comment, then timidly smiling. “Well, of course he did make me very angry sometimes. But——”

“And you have no alibi,” continued Wright, smiling still as if he were a friend, a brother, gently teasing her. “Sitting up there all alone playing gramophone records.”

Rebecca glanced at him suspiciously. Her instinct told her this was not just a bit of rather tasteless badinage. She remained silent, watchful.

“Or were you? What would you say if I told you that we have evidence you were not alone that night?” It was a common gambit in police interrogation, but it still made Nigel uncomfortable. He quickly said:

“You told me that yourself. Yesterday morning. You said, ‘We were playing the clarinet quintet and some piano concertos the night when——’ and then you broke off and pretended to have heard the telephone.”

“It was a slip of the tongue,” she got out hurriedly.

“Oh, come, Miss Loudron. That really won’t do, will it?” said Wright. “Anyway, why should you be afraid to say Mr. Barn was with you that night? It gives you both an alibi, doesn’t it—at any rate up to the time he left you? What time did he leave?”

Rebecca Loudron simply did not have the resources to cope with this sort of thing. The flustered, mutinous look which Nigel had seen on her face, when her father had been exercising his sarcasm, showed again now.

“About midnight,” she muttered. “But there was nothing—we did nothing wrong,” she defiantly added.

She’s talking about sex, not about murder, thought Nigel: either she’s innocent, or a very remarkable actress: like Lady Macbeth. Wright continued to probe. Walter Barn, whom Rebecca had telephoned in great distress after the last scene with her father, had talked with her in the kitchen till dinner, then gone up to her room, where she rejoined him at about quarter to nine after her father went to bed. She and Walter had been together there all the time till he left: neither had gone out of the room, even for a minute: she had smuggled him up some supper, and they talked and played records.

“It all sounds extremely innocent,” Wright remarked. “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

Rebecca looked indecisive, as if trying to work out, not an answer, but the implications of the answer. Finally, she threw up her head, giving it to them fair and square. “Walt asked me not to.”

“Isn’t that rather odd, since it gives you both an alibi?—for some of that night, anyway, and assuming you are telling the truth.”

“Oh, I’m telling the truth”—Rebecca threw it off almost negligently, as if it hardly needed saying. “You see Walt isn’t—he’s working-class, and they don’t like being mixed up in anything to do with—well, the police.”

“‘I don’t want to have nothing to do with that,’” Nigel murmured, quoting the inspector’s own words of Sunday evening.

“Let’s leave that. Now, Miss Loudron”—Wright spoke slowly and with the utmost seriousness—“when you were up in your room with Mr. Barn, did you hear anything? Anything out of the usual, anything that puzzles you now?”

There was a protracted pause. Rebecca seemed to be struggling with something in her mind. At last she said, uncertainly, in a low tone:

“Well, we did think we heard voices, from Graham’s room.”

“Whose voices?”

“Graham’s. And—well, it sounded like Sharon’s, the other one: but it couldn’t have been, because she was at home.”

“A woman’s voice, at any rate? Angry? Frightened? How did it sound?”

Rebecca’s face flushed darkly. She jerked out, “It was—sort of laughing. And then—then it cried out.” She lowered her eyes. “We—Walt thought they were love-making.”

“What time was this?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps an hour after I’d gone up.”

Wright could get nothing more precise than this out of her. “And that was all? You didn’t hear anyone leave the house later?”

“No. You see the gramophone was on most of the time.”

“Or—your room’s at the back, isn’t it?—a car leaving your garage?”

“No. But nobody’d have taken out a car in a fog like that, surely?”

After a few more questions, Wright took Rebecca’s fingerprints and let her go. The sergeant was sent to fetch Graham Loudron. One of Inspector Wright’s great gifts as a detective officer was his capacity for intuitively adapting himself to the personality of each different witness. With the bouncy, like Walter Barn, he could enter into the game, become jolly and unofficial, but also—if need arose—bounce them so hard that they were deflated. Rebecca he had handled, not just with sympathy, but with a kind of gentle firmness and decisiveness that would feel like moral support to one lacking in self-confidence and mental clarity. When he interviewed Graham Loudron, Nigel saw Wright’s method with a natural arguer of the toss.

As soon as Graham saw Nigel in the study, he asked Wright, “Is Mr. Strangeways here officially?”

“Do you object to his presence?” said Wright, no less coolly.

“No, I’m just surprised.”

“Inspector Wright has allowed me to co-operate,” Nigel put in. “I’m here to see that none of you makes a fool of himself.”

While Wright questioned Graham Loudron about his movements on the night of Dr. Piers’s disappearance, Nigel studied the young man’s personality. It was difficult to believe he was only twenty: the triangular face, the small, protrusive mouth, the eyes that fastened like limpets on whomsoever he was talking to, together with Graham’s self-contained manner, deferential yet obscurely derisive—all gave the impression of an experience beyond his years: experience, but not maturity.

“You told Inspector Henderson that the deceased was ‘waiting for something to happen’ that night at dinner. Can you enlarge upon it?”

“I don’t think so. It was a feeling I had.”

“You had it at the time? You’re sure it didn’t come to you later, as a result of what happened?”

“Perfectly sure.”

“You felt he was nervous . . . apprehensive?”

“No, not exactly. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. And it was as if he was keying himself up.”

“To commit suicide?”

Graham shrugged. “How can I tell? I’m not a mind-reader. I thought you’d rejected the idea of suicide, anyway.” There was a hint of a question in his last remark, but Wright ignored it.

“You didn’t see your father take a sleeping-draught, at dinner or just before?”

“No.”

According to Graham, he, James Loudron and their father had had a glass of sherry together just before dinner: Dr. Piers drank nothing with the meal, but had coffee after it in the dining-room: Rebecca had made the coffee and poured it out.

“As he felt sleepy soon after dinner, it looks as if he must have taken the sleeping-draught either in his sherry or privately before that.”

Graham Loudron agreed.

“And after dinner you went up to your room and stayed there till you went to bed?”

“Yes.”

“Alone all the time?”

“I’ve already told Inspector Henderson all this.”

“Yet your sister heard voices from your room—at about ten o’clock.”

Graham’s eyes, expressionless as shell-fish, gave nothing away. “She’s mistaken.”

“A woman’s voice. You say you did not have a woman in your room?”

“What woman am I supposed to have had?”

“Please answer the question, Mr. Loudron.”

“If I had had a woman there, I should certainly not tell you who it was,” replied Graham coolly.

“I’m not asking for her name. I’m asking, was there a woman in your room?”

“Is there any reason why I should tell you?”

“Yes. Two reasons. If you don’t, you are obstructing the police in their duties: and you are depriving yourself of a possible alibi for part of the period, at least, during which your father died.”

“Died? You evidently mean ‘was murdered’.”

“Well?”

Graham’s lips twisted sourly. “I don’t want an alibi, and I don’t care a damn about obstructing the police.”

“Tell me, did you love your adopted father?”

Graham swallowed hard. “He was very good to me. But I wouldn’t say he was a lovable man. If you mean, do I want to see his murder avenged, I’m sorry but I can’t think in melodramatic terms like that.”

“Did you ever suspect he might be your real father?”

The young man crossed his knees and began smoothing his sleek hair. His voice remained quite smooth. “Well, of course I have wondered. I couldn’t imagine why he should be so fond of me, do so much for me. But he never said anything about it.”

“And your mother, when she was alive—did she not talk about your father?”

“Do you have to drag my mother into this?” For the first time, Graham showed emotion. Then, controlling himself, he said, “She didn’t. All she told me was that he had died, in the war, soon after I was born.”

Inspector Wright switched back to the night of Dr. Piers’s death. No, Graham had heard no sounds from Dr. Piers’s room. Yes, he thought he had heard a car that night, driving out of the garage yard: it was just after he had gone to bed—about eleven o’clock. Why had he not mentioned this before?—nobody had asked him. Whose car did he think it was?—he hadn’t given it a thought, but assumed now it must have been Dr. James going out to an emergency call.

“Why did you go over to the Isle of Dogs last Saturday morning So early?” asked Wright, switching the probe again.

“But I didn’t.”

“But I saw you coming out of the Greenwich tunnel, on this side, at half past seven,” said Nigel.

“Ah. The household spy at work,” remarked Graham. His naked antipathy for Nigel, which the latter had felt the first time they met, again made the air vibrate between them.

“So you admit you were lying?” asked Wright at his chilliest.

“I admit nothing of the sort. You asked why I went over to the Isle of Dogs on Saturday morning. I didn’t. I went there on Friday night and stayed overnight.”

The inspector was on his feet, quick as a spring released, and standing over Graham. “Don’t you come this schoolboy logic-chopping over me, young man—I don’t wear that sort of thing. Why did you go to the Isle of Dogs?”

“I went to visit an old tart in Poplar, and we got talking, and by then it was so late I stayed the night in her house,” replied Graham, his composure quite unruffled.

“Her name and address, please.”

“I fail to see what my nocturnal occupations have to do with the case you’re——”

“Don’t start arguing the toss with me. If you persist in being childish, I shall send men round every house in Poplar, with your photograph: they’ll find out soon enough: and meanwhile I shall put you in the can for obstruction.”

“And what does the family friend say about that?” Graham addressed Nigel with a sneer.

“Do what the inspector asks you, and stop making a b.f. of yourself,” Nigel equably replied.

Graham Loudron gave the name and address. While his fingerprints were being taken, he remarked off-handedly, “You’ll be wasting your time on old Nelly. I go and talk to her now and then about my mother. She used to know her. But if I’m allowed to make a suggestion——”

“Go ahead.”

“Ask brother James about his mum. Ask him what she died of. Our friend here, who’s so keen on secret passages in private lives, might be interested.” Graham paused, then said with remarkable bitterness, “Funny, isn’t it, the idea of a woman in a posh house like this dying of neglect?”

When Graham Loudron had gone, the inspector flashed at Nigel one of his rare smiles, that were like the edge of a hatchet. “Beginning to open up, aren’t they, my dear old household spy? Why has that young chap got it in for you?”

“Natural antipathy, I suppose.”

“Bit of the old lag about him, I thought—I don’t mean just that sea-lawyering. Wonder if he’s been inside.”

“Yes, I’ve felt that. An approved school could have done it; or an orphanage even, if it was a bad one.”

The sergeant ushered in Dr. James Loudron, who had agreed to give Wright an interview between his surgery hour and starting his rounds.

“I hope we can get this over quickly,” he said; “the work’s getting on top of me with my father——”

“I’m sure we can, Doctor,” Wright cut in briskly. He asked James first about the sleeping-draught: James had nothing to contribute here: he certainly hadn’t seen the old man taking any that night; nor had he noticed anything out-of-the-way in his father’s behaviour at dinner, except perhaps that he talked rather less than usual.

“And now, Doctor, let me make sure that I’m clear about your own movements, just for the record. You went out shortly after dinner to see a patient?”

“Yes. Mrs. Hyams. Her first confinement. I walked along to her house about 8 p.m.”

“And returned here?”

“At 10.15.”

“The baby having been born?”

“Just so.”

“No complications?”

“I wasn’t entirely happy about the patient. She was very weak, and I feared a post-natal hæmorrhage. Our district nurse, who was mid-wifing, had to go straight off on another job, so I thought I’d look in on Mrs. Hyams again.”

“You have a most excellent reputation for conscientiousness, Doctor. I’ve discovered that already.” Wright was at his most bland and disarming. “I must say, if I’d been you, I’d have thought twice about walking back again to a patient in a fog like you had here.”

A shocked, slightly censorious look replaced the modestly gratified one with which James had received the inspector’s compliment. “It’d be highly unprofessional not to——”

“How long did it take you to walk back there?”

A dark flush, reminding Nigel of Rebecca Loudron, came over his face, and a bead or two of sweat started on his forehead.

“Nearly ten minutes, I should think. But I didn’t walk, you know. I took out a car that time.”

“Your car?”

“My father’s. Mine had developed a fault—the petrol feed. I put it right a day or two later.”

“What made you use a car, if I may ask, when you’d walked the first time?”

“Well, I was extremely tired; and I thought the fog had lifted a bit. I was wrong,” Dr. James added ruefully.

“You found your way, though, in the end?”

“Yes.”

“To—where does this Mrs. Hyams live?”

“In Crane Street.”

Oh lord! thought Nigel. That’s torn it! Wright, ignorant as yet of the topography of Greenwich, could hardly be expected to know that Crane Street was a narrow passage, not negotiable by traffic, running past the back of the Trafalgar Tavern. “So you’d naturally park the car by the Trafalgar Tavern, near the opening into Crane Street?” he said.

“Yes. That’s where I left it,” replied James Loudron looking a bit puzzled. Nigel dared not meet Wright’s eye. The doctor began to bluster a little:

“I’m sure you know your job, Inspector. But I’m a busy man, and I can’t for the life of me see the point of these questions.” He hunched the heavy shoulders which had often bullocked their way through the loose in hospital cup-ties.

“In my job,” said Wright genially, “we have to ask millions of questions, only a few of which turn out to be the crucial ones. Between your visits to Mrs. Hyams, what did you do, sir?”

He had gone up to his room, said James Loudron, wishing to read up a medical point; but Rebecca’s gramophone in the adjoining room had disturbed his concentration, so he brought the book down to the study.

“And during this period—10.15 to about eleven—you heard nothing that now strikes you as suspicious or out of the ordinary?”

“No. But mind you, I was concentrating pretty hard. I wouldn’t have noticed anything short of a telephone bell ringing.”

“I appreciate that. And now tell me, Doctor,” Wright went on with no change of tone or emphasis, “what did your mother die of?”

“My mother die of?” James’s expression of perplexity was quite ludicrous. “What on earth do you think you’re getting at?”

“I know it must seem an irrelevance. But could you please tell me?”

After a long stare at the inspector, Dr. James launched out on a medical statement, ending “what is generally known as fatty degeneration of the heart.”

“It would be incorrect to say that she died of neglect?”

“Neglect?” James exploded. “She had the best medical attention in—where the devil did you get such a preposterous idea?”

“Your brother Graham has hinted that she died of neglect.”

“Graham? The bloody little twister! Neglect, indeed! It’s absolutely insufferable.” For a moment, in the midst of the storm, an extraordinary change came over James’s angry face—a sort of breathless, anguished calm out of which, almost inaudibly, he muttered. “But how could he know?” Then he glared suspiciously at Wright, like a bull which has discovered that a nice, warm extent of sand is in fact an arena dotted with infuriating colours and inimical objects, and put down his heavy head and charged. Graham was untrustworthy, sly, disloyal. He could not stick at anything: after being asked to leave the public school to which Dr. Piers had sent him, he had been found several jobs but given each of them up—or been sacked—after a short trial. The trouble was, Graham had been over-indulged and totally spoilt by Dr. Piers.

James’s jealousy of his brother’s preferential treatment came out clearly enough; but Nigel felt there was something fictitious about his diatribe, as though he had whipped himself up into this rage against Graham in order to conceal from them, or from himself, a deeper-rooted grievance.

When James Loudron had been finger-printed and released, Wright turned to Nigel.

“Talk about happy families!” he said, rolling up his eyes. “Well, free period now for Strangeways. I’ve fixed to see Mr. and Mrs. Harold Loudron at 6.30, when he’s back from the City. Pick you up at 6.25.”

“And what will you be doing till then?”

“Amongst other things, I must have a talk with that district nurse, and with Mrs. Hyams.”

That evening, as the police car moved down Crooms Hill and into the Woolwich Road, Inspector Wright told Nigel the result of these conversations. Mrs. Hyams had suffered no post-natal complications: she and her husband had not expected Dr. James to return so soon after the birth—he had certainly not told them he would do so—but they were not surprised when he did, for he was one who “took ever so much trouble.” The district nurse was a little surprised. Though the birth had been far from easy, she had not thought Dr. James unduly anxious about the mother. On the other hand he was a bit of a fuss-pot, the nurse tactfully hinted without using the expression.

“Your comments?” asked Wright.

“If Dr. James killed his father, and it was part of a premeditated plan that he should take the Daimler and dump the body in the river, using a visit to Mrs. Hyams as pretext, I should have thought he’d have told her and the nurse that he’d be returning shortly on a second visit, just to safeguard himself. If the murder was unplanned, the result of a sudden boiling-up of passion, then the murder-method is wildly paradoxical. You don’t neatly sever people’s arteries in that state of mind—you bash them or strangle them.”

The police car turned left off the Woolwich Road, and hummed down towards the river. Harold Loudron took them into the room overlooking the Thames, where Sharon was already sitting. Nigel introduced Inspector Wright and the sergeant. After the usual preliminary politeness about being sorry to inconvenience them—just the routine of investigation—Wright said he wished to interview Mr. and Mrs. Loudron separately. Harold, frowning, started to protest about this, but Sharon said:

“Don’t be silly, Harold. The inspector won’t bite you.” Her green eyes delayed upon Wright, who returned her his most antiseptic smile. “Nigel can come and talk to me, while you’re being grilled.”

“Sorry,” said Nigel, “but I’m sitting in with Inspector Wright. Duty before pleasure.”

The red-haired girl pouted at him, then teetered out with her model’s walk. This time, Wright aimed straight for the gold.

“I understand, Mr. Loudron, you had a telephone conversation with your father the night he died?”

“Yes. But it’s quite——”

“Will you please tell me the substance of that conversation?”

“I entirely fail to see how this concerns your present business,” Harold smoothly replied.

“I am trying to establish your father’s state of mind. If he committed suicide——”

“But I thought there was no question about that.”

“That he committed suicide?”

“I—er—no—the reverse.”

“It has yet to be proved. Now, if your father had had bad news, something involving one of his family—he was very much the family man, I gather—if some disgrace threatened a member of his family, would you say he was the sort of man who might take his own life?”

“But this is quite fantastic. Purely—er—problematical.”

“Your own business affairs, for example——”

“They are my own affair. And I assure you they will bear the closest investigation.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir. Because they may have to be investigated.”

Harold started up from the kidney-shaped chair he was sitting on and flipped his cigarette into the fire-place. “This is the most unwarrantable interference with the liberties of the private citizen!”

“Oh, come, come now. In an investigation of this nature, the police are bound to inquire into background and motive. Do I take it that you refuse to tell us the substance of that telephone conversation?”

“Look here, Strangeways, is this man within his rights to put questions of this sort?”

“He is.”

“Very well then. I’ve nothing to conceal. But, frankly, I was in a slight, temporary financial embarrassment; and I did ask my father for a loan.”

“How Slight?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How much did you ask for?”

Wright’s abrupt question, so alien to the gilded circumlocutions of the City, clearly put Harold off his stroke. However, after a pause, he said:

“Frankly, I needed a fair sum. For consolidation and—er—development, you know. I had in mind a figure of £10,000.”

Wright’s eyebrows went up. “And did your father agree to back you to that extent?”

“I’ve no doubt he would have.”

“But he made no promises? On the telephone, he was heard to say the matter could not be as urgent as you represented it to be, and must wait till to-morrow.”

As Wright pursued this line, Nigel scrutinised Harold Loudron. The smooth face, the dapper figure, the uniform dark suit—one saw hundreds of this type streaming across London Bridge in the rush hour, with their bowlers and rolled umbrellas and brief-cases and copies of The Financial Times—an anonymous army, an army of ants swarming towards their mysterious occupations. That was the word for Harold—“anonymous.” What personality was concealed behind the uniform clothes, the dreary, evasive jargon? No one who keeps prefacing his remarks with “frankly” can be trusted an inch, thought Nigel: the Martini-and smoked-salmon brigade: the I’m-not-in-business-for-my-health battalion: the sailing-near-the-wind flotilla.

A steam-whistle roared. From his window-seat, Nigel saw a cargo-liner approaching, port, starboard and masthead lights jewelling the dusk.

“I believe you have a motor-launch?” Wright was saying.

“Yes. She’s laid up for the winter, though.”

Wright asked for the name of the yard. He strolled over to the window, now almost filled by the approaching ship. “Lovely view you have.” Wright gazed down a moment at the river lapping the wall from which Harold’s house-front rose.

“You were at home here the night your father died?”

“That is so.”

“Both you and your wife? No visitors?”

“Quite. We had dinner, then we played Scrabble a while and later watched a television play, till bedtime.”

“What would you say if I told you we have information that Mrs. Loudron was not here all the evening?”

Harold Loudron seemed to be groping so hard for the right facial expression with which to receive this, that he could spare no energy for a reply.

“. . . that she visited your father’s house?” Wright persisted.

A covert look of relief was instantly replaced by one of indignation.

“We have already told the police we were at home all the evening. It appears that someone is trying to make trouble for my wife and I.”

Nigel shuddered inwardly at the appalling solecism.

“Who told you this?” Harold continued.

“Information received, sir.”

Nigel observed that Wright, always one for a bit of gamesmanship, had been countering Harold’s business-English with heavy strokes of official police jargon during this interview.

“Why on earth should my wife go out in a fog like that? It’s ridiculous.”

“I couldn’t say. We must ask her.”

Wright cut short Harold’s protests, got his reluctant consent to be finger-printed, and then asked the sergeant to fetch Mrs. Loudron.

“It’s all right, I’ll get her,” said Harold hurriedly.

“Thank you, sir. The sergeant will go with you, then. . . . And that’s put a spoke in his wheel,” Wright added when they had gone out. “Pompous young smoothie.”

“You don’t look at all like my idea of a policeman,’” said Sharon as she disposed herself on the sofa.

“Oh, we come in all shapes and sizes at the Yard, ma’am.”

“What have you been doing to poor Harold? He looked perfectly devastated.”

“Giving him the third degree,” replied Wright amiably.

“And now it’s my turn. Goody,” Sharon languished at the inspector.

“Just so, Mrs. Loudron. Now tell me first about the night your father-in-law died. How long did you stay in his house that night?”

Sharon’s long red nails screeched on the marble-topped table beside her, as she convulsively drew back the hand that was reaching out languorously in Wright’s direction.

“Damn! Now I’ve broken a nail. What were you saying?”

Wright repeated the question.

“Oh, that’s absurd. I never went out that night. The fog was hellish. Harold and I had a homey evening. We had dinner, just the two of us, and then we played Scrabble and watched a television play.”

“Yet we have two witnesses who heard your voice in Graham Loudron’s room at about 9.45 p.m.”

“Two witnesses! This is insane. What in hell’s name should I be doing in Graham’s room?”

“Perhaps you went to fetch that record he’d promised you.” Nigel’s mild comment got a quite staggering reaction. Sharon’s face went suddenly haggard, the colour of dead ash, fury and fear chasing one another across it. Her hands trembled as she lit a cigarette and plugged it into a long holder. At last she got herself under control.

“Will someone tell me what all this is about?” she asked in a husk of her usual hoarse drawl.

‘Yes. That night we all had dinner together, Graham Loudron told you he’d be getting that record for you ‘in a few days,’ and you said you could hardly wait for it. What was the record, by the way?”

“How can I remember? Some record or other.” Her eyes rolled sluggishly in her head.

“Had he got it for you when you went there?”

“No. Yes, I mean.”

“Could we see it?” asked Wright, who had not the faintest clue to all this, but admirably concealed it.

“I haven’t got it. I left it there.”

“So you were there the night Dr. Piers was murdered?”

“I—no, it was another night. I remember now.”

“But you did go to Graham Loudron’s room on the night in question? the night Dr. Piers——”

“For Christ’s sake will you two stop pestering me, confusing me!” The woman almost shrieked it, her hands over her ears.

“Which room do you keep your gramophone in?” asked Nigel. “I don’t see one here.”

“We haven’t got a bloody gramophone.”

“What were you going to play the record on, then?”

Silence.

“Perhaps ‘record’ was a code-word between you and Graham for something else?” suggested Nigel.

Wright gave him a warning glance. “I don’t think we’ll pursue this any further at the moment. Mrs. Loudron does not seem very well. I’ll come back to-morrow, Mrs. Loudron, for another chat; and we can take your fingerprints then.”