CHAPTER XIII

The High Old Roman Way

CLARE’S THEORISING WAS to be tested sooner than any of them would have predicted. Wright had only been gone half an hour, and Nigel and Clare were reading books, their chairs drawn close to the cosy-stove, when the doorbell rang. Graham Loudron was standing outside.

“Well, this is a surprise,” said Clare, in markedly neutral tones, when Nigel brought him in.

“I do hope I’m not disturbing you, Miss Massinger? I imagined you wouldn’t be working as late as this.”

Graham’s suave address and jeune-premier appearance made it sound, to Nigel, like the opening lines of a third-rate West-End comedy; I am the elderly husband, solid but dull, whom the dashing and specious young man intends to supplant in his wife’s affections. By the end of Act I he seems likely to succeed. The wife is flattered: her maternal feeling for the young man is being diverted into a more questionable channel. But in Act II, our deb. daughter appears. Etc., etc.

“I really came to see your—to have a talk with Strangeways,” Graham was saying.

“Talk away,” said Clare crisply.

Oh dear, thought Nigel, the dialogue’s going wrong already.

“Get him a drink, darling,” Clare added.

Aha, she’s pretending indifference—dislike, even—to throw dust in the husband’s eyes: we must be in Scene 2 of Act I. “What would you like? Whisky? Armagnac?” Or is it a thriller, not a comedy? A hand comes out from a secret panel while the husband’s back is turned, shakes a powder into the young man’s glass. He dies, down-stage right. The husband is suspected. But the poisoner turns out to be their faithful old housekeeper, whose daughter has been seduced by the young man.

“This is ghastly about Sharon,” said the young man, cradling his glass of Armagnac in both palms.

“You were fond of her?” asked Clare.

Graham’s eyes were fastened upon hers. With an air of rueful candour, he said:

“I don’t know about fond. We’d been lovers. Once. But you know about that, don’t you . . .? She had such vitality. I can’t believe—somehow I feel responsible for it.”

“For her death? Why?” Nigel tried to make his tone sympathetic. If Graham was going to un-clam, he must not be discouraged.

The small, prehensile mouth moved, as if to get a grip on some tenable form of words. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. If I hadn’t started it——”

“You mean a general feeling of guilt?” Clare put in.

Graham mumbled something incoherent.

“Or are you worried that Harold punished her for her infidelity?” Clare went on, regardless of a warning glance from Nigel, who thought she was making the pace too hot.

“Oh, not Harold, surely,” said Graham, a shade over-strenuously. “After all, it wasn’t the first time she’d——But anyway, isn’t that Dutch seaman the likeliest person?”

“Sharon was neither robbed nor raped. We don’t even know that she was killed at the time when he came along: it may have been later. Or again, he may have seen the murder.”

“Seen it?” Graham looked horrified.

Nigel told him about the couple, apparently lovers, whom Jan had passed in the alleyway. “Jan may be useful to the police. He might be able to identify the person he saw.”

“Oh.” Graham seemed temporarily silenced by this thought. “But it was very dark, wasn’t it?” he resumed. “And the chap was blind drunk. He walked straight into the river. Or so some people living there told me.”

“That’s true. But a man can sometimes recall something, in a vivid flash, out of his drunk period. Something he didn’t consciously take in at the time.”

“That’s assuming the couple he saw were Sharon and——”

“Yes. We have no evidence for it. Yet. Would you like some more Armagnac?”

“Thank you.” Graham held out his glass with a steady hand. “I need this. To give me courage for a confession.”

Nigel and Clare withheld comment.

“Tell me—” Graham gave them his rare smile, which had considerable charm—“tell me first, are you pretty sure that Sharon’s death is linked up with my father’s?”

“Absolutely certain.”

“Very well. Then you’d better read this.”

Graham stood up, and leaning against the mantelshelf, took a folded piece of paper from his wallet, and handed it to Nigel. Nigel opened it. There were seven lines of manuscript writing, the beginning of the top line charred away: the script was either Dr. Piers’s or an excellent forgery.

. . . stall him. If I died before he could kill me—why didn’t that occur to me?—it would solve the whole problem. Justice would be done without making him a murderer. The high old Roman way out of trouble. Fall on one’s sword—only I haven’t got a sword, and if I had I’m so light I should probably bounce off the point. Petronius, then. The hedonist’s method. Euthanasia. Yes, that’s the answer.

“Where did you find this?” asked Nigel, passing the charred paper to Clare.

“In the surgery. There were several pages of an old case-book—my father had started writing his diary in it.”

“When did you find it?”

“The morning he disappeared.”

“You found the book, or just this fragment?”

“Oh, the book.”

“You were looking for it, then?”

“Of course I was looking for it,” Graham answered, a little feverishly. “He’d talked about a diary the night you came to dinner. And when he disappeared, I thought the diary might tell us why. So I worked out in my mind where the diary could be. I got it in one. Pinched the key of the cupboard, and found the case-book.”

“You read through them all till you came to this one?”

“Oh no,” replied Graham, with a veiled look, “I had a pretty good idea which year to turn up.”

“Then you tore out the pages and burnt them, all but this piece?”

“Not immediately. I kept them hidden for a while. Then my father’s body was found, and I knew the police would be turning on the heat. So I burnt the rest.”

“Why only the rest?”

Graham looked rueful again. “I meant first to burn them all. I put a match to the last sheet. But I suddenly realised how important these lines at the bottom were: so I beat out the flames just as it reached them.”

There was a long stretch of silence. Graham sat down and took a gulp at his Armagnac. He was trembling a little now, as if from a release of tension.

“I see,” said Nigel at last, unable to postpone any longer the crucial question. If Graham answered it wrongly, the answer would all but convict him of murder. “And who do you suppose is the ‘he’ your father is writing about? Dr. James?”

“James? Good lord, no. It’s me.”

Graham had not answered wrongly.

“. . . ‘stall him’—I suppose that word was ‘forestall.’ You seriously mean to tell us that what your father is saying here is that he’s going to commit suicide in order to prevent you killing him first? It takes a bit of swallowing.”

“I know. I wouldn’t believe it myself, if it wasn’t written down there in black and white.”

“So you had intended to kill him, and he knew it?”

“I’d better tell you the whole story.”

It was not until he had met Nelly, two months ago, said Graham, that he had connected Dr. Piers with his mother. When Nellie told him about the letters which Millie had sent, in extremis, to the father of her child, Graham had suddenly wondered if these might not be the letters which he had overheard James and Rebecca discussing—the cause of the dreadful estrangement between their parents. He had, of course, wondered about his own parentage often enough before this; but now everything fitted into place—Dr. Piers’s seeking him out seven years ago, taking him into his home, adopting him, and treating his subsequent misdemeanours with such leniency, all this would carry sense as the old doctor’s attempt to make restitution for what he had done to Millie.

This, Graham explained, was why he had gone straight to the case-book for 1940—the year in which, if he himself was indeed the fruit of their love, the love-affair between Millie and Dr. Piers had taken place. His father had a vein of sentiment beneath his sophisticated surface, and would be likely to choose the book of that year for his confession.

After Nellie first gave him the clue, Graham had made inquiries among those who had been hers and Millie’s neighbours in East Greenwich during the 1939–40 period. He had finally found a woman who, plied with drink in a local pub, refreshed her memory to the extent of recalling that Millie had been a patient of Dr. Piers and that she (the narrator) had suspected there was something between them when, one day, she saw Dr. Piers calling the girl into his consulting room. The pair must have been remarkably discreet, for the woman admitted she had heard no gossip about them at the time or later.

With this knowledge, said Graham, he confronted his father. It had happened a day or two before Nigel and Clare went to dinner there. Dr. Piers had not attempted to deny Graham’s charges, nor did Graham now attempt to deny that he had threatened his father’s life. The rest of the diary pages—the material he had destroyed—gave an account of this interview and of Dr. Piers’s love-affair with Millie.

Nigel questioned the young man closely about the interview, getting the impression that he was holding nothing back and not minimising the hostile attitude he had taken up.

“I must ask you this,” he said. “Did you really intend to kill your father, or were they empty threats—just to frighten and punish him.”

Graham considered it seriously. “No, I meant to. I’d hated my father for years, long before I knew who he was.”

“But when you found out it was Dr. Piers, who’d been good to you, who’d done everything he could to make up to you for what you’d gone through——?”

“It’s not what I’d gone through,” Graham interrupted with a chill, restrained violence. “Not that I could forget that, mind you. But I couldn’t forgive him for letting my mother down.”

“Yet you knew it wasn’t his fault. He never saw those letters your mother sent him, till it was too late: his wife had intercepted them.”

“Now you’re preaching at me again,” said Graham, his old Adam returning. “I can’t stick sermonising. I had enough of that from the swine I was sent to when Mother died: preaching and beating—I got the whole works, day-after day, and on an empty stomach.” His voice had gone shrill, a self-pitying whine in it. “You people who’ve had it soft all your lives can’t begin to understand——”

“Now you’re preaching,” said Clare gently.

Graham gave her his deferential smile—a smile she felt he must have cultivated during the years of inhuman treatment, so artificially ingratiating did it look, a mere baring of the teeth.

“You were going to speak about your mother,” Nigel prompted.

“You think I should have forgotten about her after all this time? No use crying over spilt milk?”

“I think nothing of the sort.”

A strange expression came over the fruit-bat face. “I was only a kid when she died. But I’ll never forget her misery during those last weeks, and how she tried to hide it from me. I’d seen her turning away to cough into a handkerchief. She spat blood. She was so weak, she could hardly get out of bed in the morning or stand up at the stove. It got so she couldn’t have men any longer. And that meant we’d no money except the little she’d saved for a rainy day. Rainy day—it was a bloody deluge! She used to give me nearly all the food she bough—said she didn’t feel hungry. I don’t know how she could cough up so much blood and stay alive. I loved her, you see. I’ve never been able to love anyone since. How the hell could anyone expect me not to hate my father, who’d let all this happen?” The words came oozing out of him, like matter from a septic wound. “We had a musical box. About all we did have left. We used to play it to each other when she’d put me to bed—before she went out on to the streets and brought a man back home. She loved that musical box: maybe he had given it to her. But she had to pop it in the end. She cried a lot. I hated her crying.”

Graham Loudron stopped abruptly, staring into the past, his eyes dry, his face hard as concrete, its rough, pitted skin testifying to those boyhood privations.

“I see you had very strong reasons for hating your father,” said Nigel after a pause. “You threatened to kill him. Why didn’t you?”

Graham looked up, startled. “He did it for me. I don’t think I’d have gone through with it, anyway.”

“Why did you destroy the rest of the diary, then?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it? When his body was found and everyone said he’d been murdered, I had to destroy the pages that gave away the motive I had for killing him, and the fact that I’d threatened to.”

“But you kept this bit, as a sort of insurance policy? You knew what Petronius did?”

“I looked it up. Severed his arteries in a hot bath. You said it’d be impossible—the cuts could not have been equally deep. Well, if Petronius could do it, my father could.”

“Petronius had a slave to do it for him, I think. Anyway, you believed this extract from his diary was proof of suicide. Why did you conceal it from us all till now?”

A sort of old lag’s smirk appeared on Graham’s face, and at once vanished. Don’t know nothing about that,” he might have been on the point of saying. He said, “I wasn’t brought up to go rushing off and assisting the authorities. Far otherwise. I just wanted to keep out of trouble—the police would ask what I’d been up to, pinching the diary. And so on.”

“And you liked the idea of stringing them along?” said Clare.

“Something of that, I’ll admit.”

“In that case, why produce it now?” asked Nigel in a neutral voice. “Because you thought you’re likely to be charged with the murder?”

“I never touched Sharon. I was at home all last night.”

“I’m talking about Dr. Piers’s death. That’s the only one the diary is relevant to. Why produce this fragment now?”

Graham’s eyes were fastened limpet-like upon Nigel’s.

“You told me Sharon’s death is linked up with my father’s,” he said. “That means one of us, one of the family, killed her. Right?”

“Right.”

“Which means either that my father’s death was not suicide—someone killed him, and then killed Sharon because she knew too much, or else this person wanted her dead for some other reason and used my father’s death as a cover.”

“Cover for what?”

“For his motive for killing Sharon. Let’s say he believes my father was murdered, though in fact it was suicide. So he arranges to kill Sharon in such a way that suspicion falls upon the imagined murderer of my father.”

“That’s a bit far-fetched.”

“And this being so,” Graham continued, disregarding Nigel, “we have a killer in the family circle who may decide he’d like to get rid of a few more of us: perhaps so that all my father’s money may come to him, not just his own share.”

“Why should he start off with Sharon, then? She only inherited indirectly, through Harold,” said Clare.

“That could be a blind,” Graham replied, with a significant look at her.

“Meaning that Harold himself killed her, just to throw dust in our eyes——”

“He had another motive too.”

“——and is now going to pick off the rest of you one by one. Do you seriously believe that?”

Nigel broke in. “You seem still convinced that your father killed himself. How on earth do you explain the disappearance of his body?”

“Obviously, someone moved it.”

“But why?”

“Search me. Wait a minute, though.” Graham’s long nose twitched inquisitively. “Suppose someone discovered the diary before I did—while my father was still alive. The bit about Petronius would give this person the idea for murdering him in such a way that it looked like suicide: but then he finds the diary pages gone, which were to be the final proof that it was suicide. No, that won’t do: I didn’t take them till after the body had disappeared. No. It must have been suicide. I’ve got it!” Graham excitedly snapped his fingers. “My father killed himself. One of us found the body, assumed it was murder, and threw the body into the Thames in the hope that, by the time it was recovered, the signs of murder would be obliterated. And I can tell you straight away which of us would be most likely to do that. Brother James. He’s a terror for the conventions. Never do for a murdered body to be found in a doctor’s house. Jolly bad show. How about that?”

Nigel had felt much of this eager ingenuity to be rather preposterous and disagreeably adolescent: but he made a non-committal reply. Then, taking up the charred and crumpled piece of paper, he said, “All this theorising of yours started with ‘Suppose someone else had discovered the diary before I did.’ Well, if we’re going to suppose that, the one really important thing that follows is that this person would read about your threats to murder your father, and would have you as the perfect scapegoat if he decided to do the murder himself.”

“Yes. That had occurred to me. But I’d have thought he’d have waited longer, to see if I wasn’t going to get rid of my father for him. It must have thrown him pretty heavily when he found the diary pages had disappeared.”

“Which of you seemed most exercised about hunting for the diary, after Dr. Piers’s death?”

“I don’t know,” Graham hesitantly answered. “Becky did most of the chasing round for it. But I remember James kept asking her if she’d come across it yet; and so did Harold.” The young man got himself to his feet. “Well, it was good of you both to let me stay so long. It’s taken a weight off my mind.” He held out his hand towards Nigel “Can I have it back?” he ingenuously asked.

“This bit from the diary? Good lord, no.”

“But you’ve read it now.”

“It’ll have to go to the handwriting experts. We must make certain it’s not a forgery.”