CHAPTER X

Whiffs from the Past

“IF SHE TOOK part in the murder and got blood on them, she’d destroy them,” said Clare later that evening. “If she told you the truth and just got them wetted by the outflow pipe, then I don’t see——”

“There’s another way she could have got blood on her stockings,” said Nigel inscrutably.

“This sphinx act is tiresome.”

“You yourself made a suggestion a few days ago, about how Dr. Piers might have died. . . . Now do you see?”

Clare’s eyes had lit up. “Oh! Yes. Then Graham wouldn’t have an alibi for that period?”

“No. Nor Sharon, of course. But his alibi would only be partial, anyway—if she told me the truth; and I think she did for once.”

“So either Dr. Piers was alive at 10.30, and had just had a bath, or——”

“Exactly.”

Clare looked puzzled. “I still can’t see those two as accomplices. What motive would they have—as a couple, I mean—for killing Dr. Piers?”

“If he’d found out about the drug racket?”

“Would that be really strong enough? For Graham, perhaps. But surely not for her?”

“I think I agree. No, I don’t see them as accomplices. There’s something Sharon said, though, while she was talking to me this evening——”

Nigel told her what it was. Clare stared at him, chewing her lip. “Well, that’s a nasty thought, isn’t it, one way and another.”

“Yes,” Nigel slowly replied.

“But then, why move the body? Or rather, who moved it?”

“The why reveals the who.”

“Oh, come off it, darling.”

“I think I know who put the body in the river.”

“Well, come on, tell me.”

He told her, and why, at some length. “But this doesn’t help us much towards the identity of the murderer. We’ve still got Graham, and Rebecca and Walt Barn; and Harold, just possibly—though it’d be hard to get round his knowing the time of that trunk call: and of course, just possibly, James Loudron.”

“And just possibly Dr. Piers himself?”

“Yes indeed. That’s the trouble. But for the medical evidence, I’d go for suicide every time. I don’t mind there being no exploratory cuts. But the equal depth of the two cuts—how does one get round that? He’d have had the resolution, but how could he have had the strength to make the second one——?”

“How could he have had the strength to make the second cut?” Nigel inquired of Graham Loudron’s impassive face.

It was the following day. Wright had telephoned to say that the search of Harold’s Jaguar had proved negative; the firm which cleaned it the previous week had noticed no suspicious stains on the upholstery or mats, and the occupants of the Pelton Road houses near which the car was parked had not heard any sound of its being driven away on the night of Dr. Piers’s death.

Now, in Graham’s tidy and impersonal room at Number 6, Nigel faced what promised to be one of the most difficult interviews he had ever undertaken.

“So the police are baffled,” murmured Graham in his sub-acid way.

“For the time being. As I say, but for that one bit of medical evidence, they would probably accept suicide.”

“And the dead body walked to the river and threw itself in?”

“What makes you think Dr. Piers killed himself in this house?”

Graham looked a trifle confused. “But I thought that was all settled. Harold’s idea about his having had a brainstorm and walked out to the river—do the police still believe that possible?”

“Does it seem to you any more improbable than that someone here should have found your father dead and gone to the trouble of dumping his body in the river?”

Graham considered it. “Well, I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It might be rather an embarrassment, professionally, for a body to be found in the house.”

“If Dr. Piers’s suicide would damage the practice, I don’t see it could matter where the body was found.”

“I expect you’re right,” said Graham indifferently.

Nigel got up, paced about the room, absently trying the locked doors of the cupboards, then walked over to the window, aware all the time of Graham’s eyes following him.

“This tree must be lovely in summer,” he said, looking out into the branches of the towering lime, where a troupe of sparrows were bickering.

Graham’s mouth moved in a faint, disagreeable smile. He said nothing.

“Why do you keep everything locked?” asked Nigel, trying a cupboard handle again.

“It’s my room. I suppose I can do what I like.”

“You had no privacy in that hideous orphanage, or whatever it was they sent you to after your mother died. And all the kids stole anything they could lay hands on. No doubt those are the main reasons.”

“You are a student of psychology?” the young man inquired, with polite sarcasm.

“Didn’t it ever occur to you that Dr. Piers was your real father?”

“Why should it?”

“But you’re not surprised at the suggestion?”

“All I knew about my father—I don’t remember my mother ever talking about him—was that he let her down: when I say ‘knew’ I mean ‘guessed.’ I never believed that stuff about his having been killed in the war. Anyway, it was obvious some man had let her down. I was a bastard, she had to go on the streets.”

Graham’s voice held no emotion; his eyes were still expressionless.

“Do you really believe Dr. Piers was that sort of man?”

“No. I suppose that’s why it never occurred to me he could be my father.” The small fleshy mouth in the triangular face pushed out meditatively. “Of course that would explain one thing.”

“Yes?”

“Soon after I came here, I overheard James and Rebecca talking about their mother. I can’t remember how it arose, but they mentioned a quarrel their mother had had with their father. It was about some letters Janet had intercepted and kept from him. Dr. Piers found out somehow that his wife had done this. He made a flaming row, and never spoke to Janet again except asking her to pass the salt. She died about a year afterwards.”

“So that’s why you said to James the other day that his mother had died of neglect?”

“Yes.”

“And you think those letters might have been from your mother, appealing to Dr. Piers for money, telling him she was very ill?”

“Well, it could be. Though, as I say, it hadn’t occurred to me before.”

“Really not?”

“I’ve just said so. Twice.”

“Although Nelly talked to you about your mother, and told you Millie had written one or two letters to the father of her child, imploring him for money? You never linked up the two things in your mind?”

“So you’ve been worming information out of that old bag?”

“Do you despise everyone except yourself?” said Nigel, nettled.

“Don’t preach at me,” Graham coldly replied. “I take people as I find them, and——”

“You took Sharon as you found her, all right.”

Graham’s eyes narrowed. “Meaning?”

“You just walked into this room and raped her.”

The young man grinned sourly at him. “The lady was only too willing.”

“But otherwise my statement is correct?”

“I suppose so.”

“Yet you told the police that you were already in this room when she arrived.”

“I don’t see the point.”

“Now you agree that you walked in and found her here. Walked in from where?”

Graham laughed, stretching his arms up behind his head. “Oh, I see. I thought your phrase about walking in was metaphorical.”

“Not a bit. Sharon tells me she waited for you here about ten minutes before you came in.”

“She’s congenitally incapable of telling the truth. Anyway, all this is immaterial, isn’t it? Oh, I see! During those ten minutes she alleges she waited here, I’m supposed to have been killing my adopted father?” Graham said it lightly, but his eyes were sticking to Nigel’s with that limpet-like fixity again.

“You might have been. At any rate, there’s ten minutes lopped off your alibi, if Sharon is telling the truth.”

“She isn’t.”

“Why should she lie about that and be truthful about the rest of the episode?”

“Search me.” Graham smiled, with a sudden and unusual charm, as if to take the offence out of his words. “Perhaps she was wielding the razor during those ten minutes.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“Of course not. My sister-in-law is much too lady-like for that sort of thing.”

“What, in fact, did she come here for that night?”

“Not for what she got,” replied Graham, his mouth reminiscently twitching.

“Well, what then? A nice chat?”

“You know damn’ well what she came for,” said Graham after a pause.

“The ‘record’ you’d promised her? A neat little parcel of——”

“You’re saying it, not me.”

“Did Dr. Piers ever tax her with taking drugs?”

“I’ve no idea. Why not ask her?”

“He was a first-rate diagnostician. He must have noticed the signs. And then he’d start wondering who supplied her.”

“This conversation is privileged, as the needle-noses say. I should of course deny that it ever took place,” said Graham smoothly.

“And of course they’d take your word rather than mine? Not that the police could do much about it, unless they found drugs in your possession, or Sharon blew the gaff to them. You’ve had plenty of time to cover your traces. And Dr. Piers is dead.”

“All this is rather tedious. Supposing that I had supplied Sharon with drugs, which I do not admit, and supposing that Dr. Piers had found this out, d’you really think he’d have gone to the police about it? He was far too keen on the honour of the family.”

“I dare say you’re right. What really interests me is why you tried to make Sharon contract the drug habit.”

Graham, watching Nigel, offered no comment, except the faint look of derision on his face.

“It could be,” Nigel went on, as if to himself, “that after your unfortunate boyhood you feel a need to exercise power over other people, and Sharon was an obvious victim with her craving for new kicks. On the other hand, it may be that you have a vindictive nature, and a strong motive for causing what havoc you can in the Loudron family: your grudge against Dr. Piers could easily extend over his children. Well, we shall find out in due course.”

During this chill analysis, the fruit-bat face betrayed a certain covert animation. Graham evidently felt more gratified to be the subject of discussion than offended by the terms in which Nigel had spoken.

“When you went with Rebecca to look for your father, the morning after he’d disappeared, was she very upset?”

“Well, in a bit of a flap, yes.”

“You looked in the bedroom. Then you both went into the bathroom?”

“No. I went by myself.”

“Did you get the impression that Rebecca was nervous—apprehensive about going into the bathroom? Did she hang back?”

Graham gave him a calculating look before replying, “I can’t honestly be sure about that.”

“Well then, when you told her Dr. Piers was not in the bathroom, how did Rebecca react?”

“I don’t remember that she said anything particular. She did look a bit stunned, I thought.”

“But you wouldn’t say she was afraid to enter the bathroom?”

“I—honestly, I can’t tell you. At that time we weren’t badly worried about my father’s disappearance. It was still possible he’d gone out on an emergency call. We were just doing what the cops call a routine search.”

“I see. And the night before, when—according to your story—you were sitting in this room and Sharon came in, what was her state of mind?”

“Good God, I’m not a mind-reader. If you mean, did she look as if she’d just come from slitting my father’s wrists, the answer is no.” Graham’s voice turned oddly peevish. “I simply can’t understand why she should have told you I wasn’t here when she came in. It’s such a pointless lie. What do the police make of it?”

“She’s not told them that bit yet, as far as I know. And just after she’d left you that night”—Nigel, moving to the window, looked out at the waste-pipe running down the outside of the wall from Dr. Piers’s bathroom on his right—“did you hear water splashing into the drain from that pipe?”

“Not that I remember,” said the young man after a pause. “I doubt if I could have, with my window shut. Why?”

“You realise that’s the waste-pipe from your father’s bathroom?”

“Of course. But Sharon left about half past ten. He was dead by then.”

“How do you know?”

Graham seemed unperturbed by this shattering question. “I don’t know. I assumed it. After all, the old boy would hardly have got up again at 10.15 or so and run a bath, when he’d taken a sleeping draught and gone to bed immediately dinner was over. Anyway, he always had his bath in the morning.”

“Did he? That’s interesting. You know, you’re the one who has inherited Dr. Piers’s brains. Why on earth don’t you do something with them, instead of these dead-end jobs you take up and drop?”

“I’m only twenty. Why should I, anyway? I don’t owe society anything—not after the way it treated me for the first thirteen years of my life.”

“But it must be so boring. Don’t you have any ambitions?”

“Not now,” replied Graham.

“But you used to?”

“Oh yes. One ambition,” said Graham with a secret smile.

“What was that?”

“To be a first-rate jazz pianist and have my own band.”

“I thought you were one. I’ll never forget that night you played for us after dinner here. ‘He was her man, and he done her wrong.’ You were thinking about your mother when you plugged that refrain, weren’t you?”

Graham, who had come out in the warmth of Nigel’s praise and interest, now closed up again. “‘Frankie and Johnnie’ is a song about homosexuals,” he coldly replied.

Five minutes later, Nigel was sitting with Rebecca Loudron, who had just come in from shopping. In the elegant drawing-room, where she had taken him, Rebecca looked out of place with her heavy limbs and country tweeds: she also looked, for no reason that Nigel could think of, on her guard. After a few polite formalities, made the more absurd both by her new grande-dame manner and by the cloud under which the Loudrons were living, she came out with, “I do hope the police will clear up this matter soon, Mr. Strangeways. People are beginning to talk in Greenwich.”

“Unpleasant talk, you mean—about your family?”

“Yes. And they look at me in such a horrid way, some of them, in the shops.”

“It must be wretched for you. But there’s probably no malice behind it: only a sort of gloating curiosity. You must outface them. It’ll die down soon.”

“My father was very popular in the district,” said Rebecca with constraint. “They think one of us killed him, for his money.”

“Which of you?”

“Harold. Or Graham. But some are saying it was me—it’s got round about my father’s opposition to Walter.”

“But my dear girl, how do you know what they’re saying? They don’t say it to your face.”

“They wouldn’t dare.” Her hands gripped the arms of the high-backed chair in which she sat bolt upright. “No, one of Walt’s friends heard talk, in a public house.” Her formal manner suddenly cracked. “Oh, it’s so beastly,” she wailed. “How much longer will it go on? James is so dreadfully worried—I don’t know what to do about him.”

“Well, you’ve got Walter.”

Rebecca’s lip began to quiver. “I haven’t seen him for nearly two days. How can he be so unkind!”

“He’s busy, I expect,” said Nigel soothingly.

“He told me, last time I saw him, that he didn’t think my having so much money would be good for him—for his painting,” she said in a frozen little voice.

“Well, that’s a new line for him. But he hasn’t broken it off, has he?”

“No. I don’t know. Oh, I’m so miserable! All this suspicion, poisoning everything! He even——” Rebecca broke off, twisting her handkerchief.

“He even suspects you? But you and he were together till midnight.”

Rebecca’s eyes swerved away from his. “Father could—it could have been done before I went back to my room after dinner,” she muttered. “Or after Walter left. Couldn’t it?”

“It might, I suppose. And, if so, Walter could have done it—that’s what’s really worrying you most, isn’t it?—before you went up to your room, or on his way out of the house at midnight?”

Rebecca hid her face ashamedly in her hands.

“And he’s saying that marriage to a rich woman would be bad for his painting, although he’d never been troubled about that before—you’re afraid it might be because he killed your father, and then lost his nerve and is trying to cut away his obvious motive for doing so?”

She nodded, her face still buried in her hands. Yes, it could be that, thought Nigel; or it could be that Walter suspects her of having murdered Dr. Piers, and is pulling out so as not to get further embroiled. Walter is one who likes not to be involved, particularly where the police are concerned. On the other hand, it was he who originally asked Rebecca to say she had been alone in her room that night. If Rebecca told the truth about that. If.

Nigel decided he had come to an impasse on this line. “Tell me,” he asked, “about this quarrel your father and mother had, a year before she died.”

Rebecca’s head went up as if sharply jerked by a bridle.

“Quarrel? How do you——? I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m all for loyalty. But blind loyalty can do appalling damage.”

“I’d rather not talk about it. You’d better ask James. It’s a private, family thing. He must decide whether you should be told about it.”

“Can you give me an assurance that it is germane to this—to your investigations?” Dr. James Loudron asked, a couple of hours later.”

“Certainly.”

“Very well. But it’s a painful matter to revive, even after all these years.”

Dr. James sat at the head of the dining-room table, where he had just finished a scrambled lunch under the formidable eye of his dead mother, whose portrait hung on the wall behind him. Rebecca had not exaggerated her brother’s state: he looked positively hag-ridden, and his burly form seemed to have shrunk within his clothes.

He poured himself another glass of water, holding up the glass to the light as if measuring a dose. “Are you quite sure you won’t have, a bite of lunch? Becky could easily——”

“No, thanks. I go without lunch as often as not; and I never take more than a light one.”

James gave him the automatic, professional eye. “Yes? Well, you look all right on it. I dare say we make too much fuss about a regular diet, though——” his voice tailed away.

“You’re going to tell me about the quarrel.”

“Yes. Ah, here’s Becky with the coffee. You’ll have a cup?”

“Thanks.”

They sat in silence till his sister withdrew again. Then James, with a lunging movement of his body, which suggested the breaking from some shackles of inhibition, plunged into the story.

“It was about eight years ago. One evening. I was in my third year of training. We were sitting in the drawing-room after dinner—my mother, Becky, and I. Father came in with some letters in his hand. He was—I’d never seen anyone look like that before: white-hot with anger; but sort of frantic too, as if he’d just woken up and found himself buried alive. He walked over to my mother and shook the letters in her face. He said—look here, I can’t see why you want to know all this.”

“Never mind. Carry on.”

“He said, ‘Janet, I hope you realise you’re a murderess, as well as a thief.’ Mother said, ‘I did it for your own good.’ He said, ‘You did it out of poisonous, despicable jealousy.’ I’ll never forget their words, or their faces. It was terrible. We’d never seen them quarrel before—not in a deadly way like that. They forgot we were in the room even, till Becky became hysterical. I had to take her out and calm her down: actually she was quite ill for several days afterwards.”

“So that’s all you heard of the quarrel?”

“No. I came down again. Father was still at it. I didn’t go in. I—I listened at the door. I was afraid he might do her some physical violence and I thought I’d better be on hand.”

“So you were able to piece the story together?”

“Yes. Of course, neither of them said a word to any of us about it afterwards. But from then on my father treated mother—well, as if she simply wasn’t there. It was bitterly cruel; whatever she’d done she didn’t deserve that. We had a miserable year. Then she died. Of course, she had a bad heart condition before: but she couldn’t go on living, with my father behaving as he did.”

Nigel watched James Loudron intently. The emotion released through that hag-ridden face was painful to see. The doctor was beyond embarrassment, gripped by a feeling which shook to bits his usual stolid, professional decorum.

“I take it,” said Nigel, “that those letters were from a young woman who had had a child by your father and was appealing to him for help?”

“They were blackmailing letters,” James grimly rejoined.

“How do you know? You didn’t read them.”

“That’s what Mother called them.”

The two Millies, thought Nigel: Janet Loudron’s blackmailing bitch; Nelly’s sweet-as-narcissus friend. He said:

“Your mother had intercepted the letters, then?”

Janet Loudron, according to James’s account, must have opened the first of them quite by mistake. Two or three more came, which she was then on the look-out for. Dr. Piers, a few days before this hideous scene, had somehow got to hear of Millie’s death in 1945. He must have wondered why she had never written to tell him that she was very ill and no longer receiving money from him: but suppose she had written, what could have become of the letters? There was only one answer, to anyone familiar with Janet’s possessive, moralistic and ambitious nature. She would see Millie as not only an episode in her husband’s past which must be hushed up, but as a potential menace to his career as well as their marriage: it was not in her to feel the sweetness and unselfishness (if Nelly was right about Millie’s character) which breathed through the letters. But why had she hidden, not destroyed them? Because, thought Nigel, their existence would represent for her a latent source of power over her brilliant and authoritarian husband; or perhaps simply because she was the kind of woman who keeps everything. Anyway, what did it matter now?

“You and Rebecca used to talk about this sometimes, after your mother died?”

“Yes. It was partly therapeutic. I mean, Becky had taken it very hard, as I told you. And I judged it was better for her to talk about it than to keep it bottled up.”

“Very wise, I dare say. And one day Graham overheard you both discussing it.”

“So that’s how you knew—it would be Graham, the little bastard.”

“‘Bastard’—do you realise what you’re saying?”

James Loudron gave him a puzzled look. “Well, he is an absolute—” his slowish wits were visibly working—“good God, you’re not suggesting——?”

“Surely it must have occurred to you that Graham might be this girl Millie’s child by your father?”

“What? Occur to me that my father would bring his bastard into our house and give him my mother’s room to live in? I must say you credit me with a pretty lurid imagination.”

Nigel was unimpressed by this disclaimer, but did not say so.

“Well, your mother was dead. Your father may have felt he must make some reparation to the other woman and her child.”

“Yes, but damn it, Mother’s own room! Talk about adding insult to injury!”

Nigel gazed steadily at him. “You took sides, didn’t you?”

“Took sides?”

“You and Janet were against your father, on your mother’s side, after the quarrel. And you still are, though they’re both dead.”

“What if I am?” James glared back at him with a kind of fuddled menace, almost as if his unwonted display of emotion had intoxicated him. Nigel let the silence protract itself.

“Well, what if I am?” James repeated. Then slowly, with the air of one who makes an almost incredible discovery, he went on, “You’re not suggesting that I—that I’ve been saving up my bitterness against my father for the way he treated my mother—saving it up for eight years?”

“Savings accumulate,” murmured Nigel.

“You must be mad. If I was going to kill him, I wouldn’t have waited all this time. Damn it, we got on quite reasonably well together——”

“Well then, who did kill him? Who is it you’ve been trying to protect?”

James Loudron rose abruptly and lunged out of the room.