CHAPTER XIV

How the Body Vanished

“I SEE YOU’RE sleeping here now,” remarked Nigel, glancing at the camp-bed covered with a tartan rug which was ranged against one wall of the study.

“Yes,” Dr. James Loudron replied. “I have to be by the telephone at night and there isn’t one in my own room. There’s an extension in my father’s, of course: but I don’t like the idea of——”

“Sleeping there? Naturally. You sleep well?”

“Luckily. But the traffic on this side of the house wakes me up rather early. Why do you ask?”

“You look as if you needed sleep.”

And indeed the doctor did. His eyes were heavy, as if it took a painful effort to move them in their sockets: the skin beneath them looked stained and pouchy. His solid shoulders drooped dejectedly. He seemed a man at the end of his tether. A haunted man. Or a bewildered ox.

“Well, I’ve got a half day at last. The first since——” His voice petered out again.

“And it’s good of you to let me take up a bit of it. How did you manage?”

“One of my colleagues at the hospital agreed to do locum for a while. He’s taken over some of my father’s patients.”

There was another silence. Dr. James seemed too exhausted even to ask Nigel why he was here. Nigel glanced round the study, at the bed, the bookshelves, the telephone, the panelling which Janet had had painted to resemble stripped wood, in a pathetically misguided attempt to please her husband. It was in here that Walt Barn had beaten up the newspaperman, while Rebecca looked on, half appalled, half fascinated. And in here, maybe, Dr. Piers Loudron had written the diary, a fragment of which was now being examined by the handwriting experts.

“That voice you heard on the telephone——”

“Voice? When?” said James dully.

“The bogus call that took you out, the night Sharon——”

James visibly flinched. “Oh, for God’s sake! Must I go into all that again? I told the inspector I could not identify it.”

“Not even if it was a man or a woman speaking?”

“No. . . . But look here, how could it have been a woman?”

“Why not?”

“But, damn it, wasn’t it the—the person who killed Sharon? Ringing up to get me near the place where——?”

“And couldn’t Sharon’s murderer, or an accomplice of the murderer, be a woman?”

Dr. James lowered his head, in the old, dangerous, bull-like way.

“Are you insinuating that Becky——?”

“Why Becky?”

“She’s the only woman left in our family, isn’t she? And that stocking!” The doctor shook his head as if to clear it, then burst out in the gravelly voice of exhaustion, “Who is it? Who is it that hates us so?”

“Hates you?”

“Using that stocking of Mother’s out of Becky’s drawer. Hiding my driving gloves. It’s absolutely fiendish. You know, if this goes on, I shall become paranoiac. My Jewish blood. We succumb to persecution-mania all too easily. No resistance.”

Nigel eyed him in silence for several moments. The time had come. He had put this off too long, and he knew why. The lie would be no more morally respectable because it was necessary in order to clear the way to the truth.

“And now,” he said, “I’m afraid you’re going to number me amongst the persecutors.”

James Loudron gazed at him in a lacklustre way.

“Will you not tell me the truth about the night when your father’s body vanished?” said Nigel, without inflection.

“What on earth do you mean?” Dr. James sounded angry, but as if his will was lashing a tired mind into anger. “I resent that very much. I have told the truth—all I know about it—over and over again. I’m sick and tired of the whole business.”

“When you came in that night, after delivering the baby, you went to your father’s room—perhaps to say good-night, perhaps to consult him. You found him dead. In the bath. You wrapped the body in his tweed overcoat, carried it out through the back door, put it on the front passenger’s seat of his car, drove to the river, and tipped it in beside the Trafalgar Tavern.”

James was staring at him stupidly, as if hypnotised. “You’re mad. You must be mad. I went back in the car to my patient’s house, because——”

“The woman had no complications,” Nigel went on tonelessly. “There was no reason whatsoever to return there so soon after the birth. And there’s no other reasonable explanation why you should have taken the car when the fog was so bad that on your first visit you had to walk there.”

“But I have explained that. I thought the fog had lifted a bit. And who the devil are you to instruct me about my medical duties?” the doctor added with another feeble spurt of anger.

“You were seen putting the body in the river. The police have found an eye-witness at last. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but——”

James Loudron’s whole face and body sagged. In his rumpled suit he looked like a fifth-of-November guy. “Is that true?” he muttered, glaring sightlessly. “They’re going to arrest me, you mean? For the murder?”

“They will certainly bring a charge. What that charge will be depends upon your telling the truth. If you could give me the facts now——”

“I—would you mind if my sister was here?”

“After a pause, Nigel said, “Very well.”

“She’s in the garden, I think. I’ll fetch her.”

When James had gone out, with a stiff, old man’s gait, Nigel had leisure to ruminate on the unpleasant ruse by which he had brought things to a head, and on James’s next movements: the garden, after all, led to the garage, and at this very moment James might be making a bolt for it.

In a couple of minutes, however, James returned with Rebecca. Brother and sister sat side by side on the sofa, looking like chastened children, holding hands. James looked up at Nigel.

“You do realise this means the finish of my career?”

Nigel nodded, feeling sickened by himself. His eyes rested on James Loudron’s face: its expression had changed, putting into Nigel’s mind the lines, “If calm at all, if any calm, a calm despair.”

“James didn’t do it!” exclaimed Rebecca, with a flash of her brown eyes.

“I didn’t do it. But I did quite enough to, well, make the police believe I did. Sorry, that’s not very coherent.” He lifted his heavy gaze towards Nigel. “I’ve just told Becky, outside, that it was I who put my father’s body in the river.”

“But he didn’t murder him,” said Rebecca fiercely. “James would never kill anyone in a cowardly way like that.”

“Tell that to the police, Becky!” said her brother. “Strangeways says they’ve found an eye-witness—someone who saw me by the Trafalgar Tavern.”

Nigel would not meet Rebecca’s eyes; but he felt they were scrutinising him keenly. “You’d better tell us exactly what happened,” he said.

Rising, James moved to the window and turned round with his back to it, as if he could not bear the light upon his face. Past his bulky shoulder, Nigel could see the February sunshine palely gilding the stucco of the derelict cinema, once a Victorian music-hall, on the opposite side of the road: a pigeon flew out of one of its shattered windows.

“When I got back from the confinement, I went to father’s room. I was a bit worried about another patient, and wanted to consult him. You know,” James added with a rueful half-smile, “he had more medicine in his little finger than I and a dozen other——”

“And he let you know it,” Rebecca put in.

“Well, he wasn’t there. Something made me go through into the bathroom. His body was there. In the bath. Naked. The arteries had been cut. One of his razors lay in the bath beside him. The water was pink, but I could see it. I made sure he was dead. Then I examined the cuts.”

“And you realised at once it was not suicide?”

“Almost at once. I’m a bit rusty on the medico-legal stuff; but there were no preliminary cuts—I knew about the significance of that, of course—and then I examined closer and saw the two incised wounds were of equal depth.”

“So you knew it was murder? And the murderer must be one of this household, or somebody who had a key to the house?” Nigel was aware of the tenseness with which Rebecca sat there, her eyes fastened on her brother. “That was why you took the terrible risk of moving the body? You were afraid of the effect it would have on the practice if Dr. Piers was found murdered in his own house?”

“Yes.”

“No!” Rebecca cried out forcefully. “I won’t let you make yourself out so mean, so—so mercenary. James was afraid that——”

“Please, Becky!”

“James was protecting me. He thought I’d done it. He’d overheard me telling Father I wished he was dead.” The woman spoke in a white heat of exaltation, and went on talking, even more rapidly and incoherently, until, James shook her by the shoulders, commanding, “Stop that, Becky! You’re getting hysterical. Stop it at once!”

“Well anyway,” said Nigel when she had calmed down, “whatever your reason was, you moved the body. Tell me exactly what you did. It may be important.”

James Loudron had let the bloodstained water run out of the bath. He then wiped all traces of blood from the body, and cleaned the bath so that there should be no tell-tale rim. He pocketed the razor, fetched his father’s Connemara-tweed overcoat from the bedroom, wrapped the body in it, and carried it out to the garage.

“Were the bedroom or bathroom doors locked while you did all this?”

“I’d locked the bathroom door, not the other one.”

“You were so sure it was murder, you didn’t look for a suicide note?”

“No. I’d no doubt. It’s occurred to me since, of course, that the murderer meant it to look like suicide.”

“Why the tweed coat? You’d wiped the blood off the body, and there’d be no more bleeding.”

“You’ll think it rather queer—I’m a doctor, after all, and used to handling cadavers—but I felt there was something indecent about carting him around naked. He was my father.”

“You thought that, if you threw him into the Thames, the body would not be found till decomposition had removed the signs pointing to murder?”

“Well, I suppose so. Confused them, anyway. But I don’t know that I really thought it out so far ahead. I—well, I was in a bit of a panic. I just wanted to get rid of the body. And I had what seemed a good excuse for going out again, to a spot just beside the river.”

“Supposing it had been low tide?”

“Oh, when you’ve lived here as long as we have, you know the state of the tides, almost by instinct.”

“So you got the body to the garage: unobserved, as far as you know.”

“It would have been commented on,” James sourly rejoined, “if anyone had noticed me walking about with a corpse.”

“And then?”

“I took him to the river and dumped him in. I’ve told you so. Do you want a running commentary on every stage of the process?” For a moment James was stirred out of his flat dejection.

“Yes, I do. It’s not idle curiosity. You’ve been bottling it all up too long—what must have been the most horrible experience of your life. It’ll do you good to let it out.”

“You think I’m heading for a nervous breakdown otherwise? But that’d get me into the prison hospital instead of a cell.”

“Oh James!” Rebecca burst into sobs. This time her brother disregarded her, and she soon stifled them.

“Accessory after the fact,” he said, “that’ll be the charge, won’t it?”

Nigel was silent.

“You don’t think I’m making all this up to cover the fact that I killed him myself?” James persisted.

“Oh lord no, you didn’t kill him.”

Rebecca’s head came up sharply, as if someone had jerked it by the heavy coils of hair.

“That overcoat,” Nigel went on. “Feeling it was indecent to carry him about naked. A person who killed him in that way wouldn’t have that sort of feeling; and I don’t think you’ve got the sort of imagination to make it up afterwards.”

Yet the doctor, as he recounted the details of that grisly ride to the river, showed more imagination—or sensibility, at least—than many would have credited him with. While he talked, Nigel glanced from him to Rebecca; sitting dry-eyed now, and from her to the yellowish, derelict cinema on the far side of the street, with its medallions and broken windows and the boards fastened to the façade—FREEHOLD FOR SALE.

“I managed to get him propped up beside me on the front seat. It was like old times, sort of. When I was qualifying, I used to drive him on his rounds, during the vacations. The fog was as bad as ever. I had to open the side window to see anything at all. I remember thinking he’d get cold with nothing on but that overcoat. Bloody silly. But he—the body kept lolling up against me, as if for warmth. I got out of Burney Street, and into the High Road past St. Alfege’s. It was driving blind—never knew which side of the road I was on till I hit the kerb. Then I damn nearly ran into the traffic island at the end of Nelson Parade. That gave me the cold shudders—suppose I had an accident and was found with a corpse on the front seat. I nearly jumped out and ran away at that point. It must have taken me five minutes to reach the Naval College. And then I nearly hit the traffic island beyond the bus stop. I had to wrench the wheel to the left, and the body—well, he gave me a sharp nudge in the ribs. I could almost hear him say, ‘Keep your mind on your driving’—he was always the backseat driver, wasn’t he, Becky? Well, when we’d missed that island and got round into the Woolwich Road, I picked up a rear-light in front of me—bloke crawling even slower than myself—and closed up on him as near as I dared and trailed along behind him. I had to keep one eye on him in case I bumped him, and the other on the look-out for the left turn into Park Row. Luckily there’s a pedestrian crossing just before the turn, and I was able to pick out the zebra just in time to swing left. When I got down to the river I had a violent fit of coughing—result of driving with my head out of the window all the way—so I had to shut the window in case anyone heard me. I parked as near the river-wall as I could get, and dragged Father out. The overcoat nearly came off him. I did up all the buttons and put the razor in the pocket. It was dead quiet. The fog. I felt as if I was deaf as well as blind. Then I heard the water lapping, and carried him in that direction. I lifted him over the railing and dropped him in. It seemed to make a hell of a noise, after the silence. That’s all there is to it. How anyone could have spotted me in that fog, I can’t imagine. I remember saying—sort of in my head—just after the splash, ‘Father, forgive us our trespasses.’ And that’s bloody queer too, since I don’t believe any of that stuff; and if I was saying it to my earthly father, then we had a damn sight more trespasses to forgive him than vice-versa—Mother had, anyway.”

The monotonous, compulsive voice stopped, making way for a silence as absolute as that which must have closed in after the body of Dr. Piers Loudron had fallen through the fog into the water, and the ripples had died away.

“Tell me one thing,” said Nigel at last. “Who did you think had killed your father?”

James Loudron gazed back at him in stubborn silence.

“I said all along you were trying to protect someone. There’s only one of your family you’d go to such lengths to protect.”

“Can’t you leave me alone now?” said James, in a small voice that sounded as if it came from the bottom of some fathomless pit.

“Yes, why don’t you leave him alone?” exclaimed Rebecca, taking her brother’s hand.

“Two murders have been done.”

“And James thought it was I who killed our father. No, James, of course you did. I hated him for what he’d done to Mother, and the way he treated me—always making me inferior—his everlasting snubs. And then when I had a chance of happiness, with Walter—Father had no use for me, except as a housekeeper, but he wouldn’t let me go. He——”

“Quiet, Becky! You’re getting hysterical again.”

“Yes. Like I did when Mother and Father had that terrible quarrel. Go on, say it!—I’m unbalanced, not responsible for my actions.”

“Don’t be absurd, Becky. You’re as sane as I am.”

“Still protecting your poor wretched sister?”

“Oh, for God’s sake——”

“Well, did you kill him?” asked Nigel in an equable tone.

Rebecca Loudron turned her blazing eyes upon him. “No. I just wished him dead. Time after time. And at last he was dead. Shall we take the will for the deed?”

The old James Loudron, so easily embarrassed by displays of emotion, looked out from the heavy, exhausted face of the man on the sofa. “I think we’d better call it a day. Do you want me to give myself up to the police now? I’d like to make some arrangements with Lightfoot, my locum.”

Nigel could not meet his eyes. “Just a minute. I’ve something to tell you.”

Before he could say it, Rebecca had pounced upon it with a leap of intuition. “You were lying! The police have no eye-witness.”

“Becky, please! Strangeways would never——”

“If someone had really seen you throw Father’s body into the river, would he wait all this time before telling the police?”

She stared implacably at Nigel, who said:

“No. There was no eye-witness.”

“Ana now you’ve wormed it out of James by a foul trick, you’ll trot off to the police and——”

“The police suspect it was your brother who moved the body. They have no evidence. I do not propose to give them any,” Nigel flatly replied.

“So you were just playing a cat-and-mouse game for your own private amusement. That makes it more despicable still.” Rebecca Loudron was almost beautiful in the flush of her indignation. “What sort of a creature are you?”

“One of your family has murdered twice. He must be stopped, before it becomes a habit. He won’t be stopped if the rest of you conceal the truth. Sharon was strangled with a silk stocking out of your drawer. Perhaps she’d concealed something which would have saved her life if she’d come out with it. Perhaps you know something which would have saved her.”

“How could I?” said Rebecca uncertainly. “What do you mean?”

“Something, for instance, about Walt Barn?”

Her eyes opened wide in consternation. “Walt? But that’s absurd! He wasn’t there,” she cried, her voice going up on the last word.

Nigel stared hard at her. “Say that again,” he demanded

“I said he wasn’t there. He left this house soon after eleven. I saw him off, saw him pushing his bicycle up the hill. I stood in the door for a minute or two. He didn’t come back down the hill. He could never have got to—to where Sharon was killed, if he’d gone all the way up the hill and along the south of the park and down Maze Hill—there wouldn’t have been time.”

Nigel cut in on her babbling. “Never mind that, Miss Loudron. The morning your father disappeared and you and Graham went to look for him—you told me that Graham tried the bathroom.”

“Yes,” said Rebecca, mystified.

“You didn’t go in yourself. Right?”

“Yes.”

“When he went into the bathroom, Graham called out, ‘He’s not here.’ You remember that?”

“Yes.”

“How did he say it?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Say the words as he said them. Try to remember the exact intonation,” Nigel urgently asked.

Rebecca hesitated, an anxious look on her face—the same look that had so often appeared when her father cracked his intellectual whip at her. “Honestly, I don’t think I can—I’m not good as a mimic.”

“Well, for instance, did he say it like this”—Nigel spoke the phrase with a fairly level intonation, stressing the last word—“or was it more like this?”—his voice went down in pitch on the second word and hit a high note on the last one.

“Yes, that was it,” Rebecca exclaimed. “The way you said it the second time.”

“Good. You see what that means, particularly when you take it in conjunction with what you told me about Graham’s not having seemed at all worried about your father till that moment?”

“Well, he did seem pretty upset when he came out of the bathroom. But——”

“You mean,” James put in, “he’d only say ‘He’s not here’ in that surprised sort of way if he’d expected him to be there?”

“Precisely.”

“And what deduction do we draw from that, my dear brother and sister?” came a voice from the doorway.

Graham Loudron had been listening for an unknown period of time. He now walked in and put himself on the window-seat.

“So it was you, James, who disposed of the—er—remains? I always suspected it,” he coolly remarked.

“Eaves-dropping again, you filthy little tick!” James shouted. He made to get up from the sofa, but Rebecca restrained him.

“How could you have been so surprised that Father was not in the bathroom,” she said, in an almost gloating voice, “if you hadn’t seen him there the night before—if you hadn’t killed him in the bath yourself?”

“You were always jealous of me, weren’t you? Both of you?”

“Keep to the point,” said James. “Answer her question. You can’t wriggle out of that one, can you?”

Their enmity pulsated in the room like scorching breath from a furnace. The three Loudrons seemed to have forgotten Nigel’s presence.

“My poor James, there are several answers. Becky couldn’t possibly remember how I said it—she’s tone-deaf.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Well, what’s much more likely is that she’s pretending I said it in that surprised way, so that she can put the blame on me for the murder. You’d like me out of the way, wouldn’t you?”

“The police will be interested in that theory,” said James.

“Police? I can just see you going to the police with it!” Graham uttered an uncheerful laugh. “If you do I shall tell them about your disposal of the body. No, it’d better be Strangeways here who plays the role of tale-bearer. After all, he enjoys it.”

“Do you know—” Nigel affably remarked, gazing at Graham’s head outlined against the window—“do you know that your face is the shape of an isosceles triangle the wrong way up?”

Graham’s silhouetted form became rigid.

“So that, if I turned you upside down, you’d be resting on your base, so to speak. Bear that in mind. I’d do it, but for the disgusting things that might fall out of your pockets.”

The other two stared at Nigel, bemused. Graham, profoundly uneasy, shifted off the window-seat and took a chair at the round table. “I suppose all this means something,” he said.

“On the contrary, it means nothing at all. That’s the beauty of it. Are you acquainted with the fruit-bat or flying fox? Pteropidae, they’re called, if you prefer Greek.”

“I simply don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come, come. I asked a simple question. Either you are acquainted with the pteropidae or you aren’t.”

“Well, I’m not, as it happens,” Graham sulkily replied.

“That’s better. Now, let’s try another simple question. Was your father dying or dead when you found him in the bath?”

“But I didn’t find him in the bath,” replied Graham, in the elaborately patient manner of one humouring a lunatic. “He wasn’t there.”

“You see? Even now your voice goes up in that protesting way at the end of the phrase. You’re still genuinely indignant that the body wasn’t there. Surprised and indignant. It simply wasn’t playing the game for the body to have disappeared. But I was talking about the previous night. While Sharon was waiting for you in your room. You’d gone to Dr. Piers’s bathroom. Did you find him dying or dead? Surely you can remember? Or were you in such a panic that you didn’t try to find out?”

“But I never went to——”

“Be careful. Think of the consequences of denying it. If you’d found him happily singing in the bath, you’d never have been in such a state—‘terribly worried,’ as Rebecca put it—next morning when you discovered he wasn’t there. So, the night before, you found him either dead or dying.”

“But I tell you—”

“Or, if you didn’t, there’s only one alternative—that you killed him yourself.”

Nigel threw a forsenic glance at James and Rebecca, as if they were members of the jury. Graham merely shrugged his shoulders: Nigel’s attempt to rattle him out of his composure had not quite succeeded.

“Either alternative,” Nigel continued, “would account for the strange state of excitement Sharon noticed in you when you returned to your room.”

“You seem to forget, I have never admitted to being out of my room that night. It was Sharon’s story that she waited ten minutes for me there.”

“And now Sharon is dead, so she cannot talk about that night any more.”

Graham shrugged his shoulders again.

“You had threatened to kill your father,” Nigel began.

“What’s that?” exclaimed Dr. James. “How do you know this? Is it true?”

“Graham told me himself.”

“But why should you want to kill him?” The words came out involuntarily from Rebecca. She flushed. “I mean, you were always his favourite.”

“He seduced my mother, and then let her bl—bleeding well starve to death,” the young man stuttered.

“I simply don’t believe you,” said James. “Melodramatic bosh.”

“Of course your mother was equally responsible.”

“How dare you say that!” James shouted. “You take that back, or I’ll——”

“Your mother intercepted the letters my mother sent him when she was dying. Have you forgotten that quarrel? Becky hasn’t.”

“Leave my sister out of it, you wretched little twerp!”

“I can’t. She’s in it. Up to the neck. She hated her father as much as I did, and you know it. Laugh that one off. She didn’t dare go into the bathroom next morning. She pretends it was I who got the shock when the body wasn’t there. And she put the sleeping-draught in his coffee—oh yes, she did, I saw her. You did, didn’t you, Becky?”

Rebecca Loudron’s eyes glared rigidly at him. Her mouth worked as if she were suffocating, then opened in a long, wailing sound, and she stumbled out of the room.