‘Paul, I’ve been thinking about this business. About the Curzon case. There’s an awful lot I don’t understand.’
He smiled. ‘There’s quite a lot I don’t understand myself, darling.’
They had been driving for six hours and Steve was feeling bored. She preferred a small car for such long journeys, where you were aware of the ride and could feel some sense of adventure. The smooth and spacious Rolls could be tedious. She had been staring from the window at the desolate moorland since Malton, wondering whether to wave at the sheep or eat a box of After Eights.
‘Yesterday lunchtime, for instance,’ she said. ‘Who telephoned Mrs Balfour?’
‘Kenzell, of course. But Walters was already outside watching the flat. He knew that we were at the Savoy, and as soon as he saw Kate leave he assumed that the flat was empty. So he broke in.’
‘To steal the notebook,’ Steve murmured. ‘I suppose those figures give the whereabouts of a hoard of diamonds?’
‘I suppose so.’ Paul turned right on to the coast road, increased his speed and overtook a holiday coach. ‘From the plane that crashed on the cliffs. Obviously the Frenchman Duprez used to bring them over in charter planes which were diverted over the Yorkshire coast. He used to drop the package to a waiting fishing-boat and all was well, until that night when the plane dropped too low. I imagine that was how the plane came to crash, don’t you?’
‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Steve. ‘And when the plane crashed Curzon was too slow off the mark. Somebody else found the diamonds first.’
‘Well done. Yes, and I think that was Baxter. He was a relatively unimportant member of the gang, but as soon as he found the diamonds he decided to play for higher stakes. He hid the package, and then tried to contact Curzon.’
‘Why should he want to do that?’
‘I suppose he wanted a more important role, more money. It’s my guess that Baxter didn’t know the identity of Curzon. He would have dealt with the top man through an intermediary.’
Steve nodded. ‘I can see why he wanted Tom Doyle to look after the boys. He knew he was playing a very dangerous game.’
‘Exactly.’
They swept over the brow of the hill and along the deserted lane. The Forestry Commission forest stretched away to their right in neatly regulated lines. There was a car in the distance, parked by the entrance to an authorised Forestry Commission walk. A nature lover at large.
‘So who is Curzon?’ asked Steve.
‘Well,’ Paul said thoughtfully, ‘it might be Lord Westerby, or Peter Malo, it might be Tom Doyle, even, or Dr Stuart…’ He drove into the side of the lane and pulled up by the parked car. ‘Having trouble, doctor?’ he called.
It was Dr Stuart’s battered Rover. The bonnet was up and Dr Stuart was staring perplexedly at the engine. He had prodded the parts he recognised and given the wheels an angry kick, but that had exhausted his mechanical resources. ‘There’s a gremlin in the water supply,’ he said to Paul. ‘Boiling like mad, and the engine has no power.’
Paul peered knowledgeably under the bonnet. ‘Ah yes, I see what’s wrong,’ he said. ‘There you are, a loose fan belt.’
‘Incredible,’ said the doctor. ‘And now what happens?’
‘Oh, we just wallop that bit there with something heavy and then tighten a nut.’
‘Amazing.’
Paul belaboured the appropriate bit with a crowbar and then crawled underneath the car with an adjustable spanner. The doctor turned to Steve. ‘I admire a man who knows how to strip down a car. The internal combustion engine is a complete mystery to me.’
‘Paul knows about loose fan-belts,’ Steve said unfairly. ‘We had one a month ago and we spent three hours in a layby outside Oxford waiting for a man to come and mend it.’
A few moments later Paul emerged looking dirty but pleased with himself. ‘There,’ he said, ‘that should have fixed it.’ He leaned into the car and pressed the starter. The engine roared into life. ‘You won’t have any more trouble with that.’
‘Extraordinary. I’m terribly grateful, Temple. I’d have missed my surgery if I’d had to walk from here.’
‘Think nothing of it, doctor.’ Paul wiped his hands on a clump of grass. ‘By the way, I’m sorry about your friend. I feel in a way responsible as he died burgling my flat.’
‘Which friend? Oh, you mean poor old Walters.’ Dr Stuart switched off the ignition in his car and then sat conversationally on the running board. ‘Yes, he was an engaging character. Quite a rogue, I should think, but I became quite fond of him. You don’t meet many people like him in Dulworth.’
Paul agreed. ‘Had you known him long?’
‘No, not really. I met him about six months ago. He came to the surgery one morning with a nasty gash on his hand. I did what I could for the laddie, and since it was lunchtime I let him take me down to The Feathers for a bite to eat. After that I suppose I saw him most times when he was up here.’
‘Why did he come up here?’ Paul asked.
‘Business, I suppose, although he never discussed it with me. Apparently he ran a couple of clubs in London.’ Dr Stuart smiled sadly. ‘If he thought he could open up a gambling club in Yorkshire I’m not surprised he ran into trouble.’ He shook his head sadly and climbed back into his car. ‘I’ll be seeing you two again, no doubt.’
‘Almost certainly,’ said Paul. He prepared to drive off, but as an afterthought he asked whether Diana Maxwell was better.
‘Aye, she’s back at home now, although I’ve confined her to bed for a week.’ With a wave of his hand and a splutter of exhaust Dr Stuart bumped on to the road and drove away. Paul followed him across the moors as far as the Whitby road and then they parted company.
It was eight o’clock when they reached the hotel and tottered into their suite. ‘Phew!’ said Steve, ‘I’m hot and jaded. I think I need a shower.’ She hurried into the bathroom while Paul was taking the succession of messages that were waiting. She slipped out of the orange cotton dress and turned on the shower.
The water was cool and exhilarating. Steve waved her arms in the spray and absent-mindedly listened to Paul making his telephone calls. She heard him call Room Service for two long, iced drinks. It was, she decided, a blissful evening. A stray fly was buzzing against the window. The sound of summer. Voices in the distance of children playing on the beach.
‘Hurry, Steve! Lord Westerby is expecting us at eight-thirty.’
But Paul was on the telephone again when she came out of the shower in her bath towel. Steve selected her Giselle dress with the ruched shoulders and bodice and the long sleeves falling to the ground in a point.
‘I’m talking to Inspector Morgan,’ Paul whispered with his hand over the receiver. ‘He says that Tom Doyle is drinking like a fish and behaving strangely.’
Steve pursed her lips in polite surprise and half listened to the telephone conversation while she sipped her drink.
‘So where do you think Tom’s finding the money for this kind of living?’ Paul asked the inspector. ‘It sounds expensive.’
As Paul continued discussing the transformation Steve indicated her wristwatch. ‘Half past eight,’ she mouthed, ‘dinner with Lord W.’ She drained her glass and stood up in anticipation of leaving. The shower had completely revived her.
‘I’m sorry, Inspector, I must go. My wife is waiting…’
Paul drove too fast out of the narrow streets of Whitby and then pressed down hard on the accelerator as they reached the moorland road. Steve closed her eyes. Tom Doyle was behaving strangely, she understood, but that was no reason for driving the Rolls into a ditch.
‘I’d like to know where he’s getting the money from,’ Paul said at last. ‘Inspector Morgan thinks someone is giving Tom Doyle money to stop him from talking, but I’m not so sure.’
‘Lord Westerby?’ asked Steve.
‘I don’t know.’ Paul swerved with a screech of tyres round a sudden war memorial. ‘Why does Lord Westerby crop up so often? Dammit, we have to work out some proof of Curzon’s guilt, that’s the only thing of importance. We don’t need Tom Doyle to make things more complicated.’
‘Do you mean,’ Steve asked suspiciously, ‘that you know who Curzon is?’
‘Of course I know, that’s the easy part. But proving—’ He stamped on the brakes, swore angrily and sent the car into the side of the road. ‘Did you see that? The bloody fool stepped in front of the car!’
Steve grinned. ‘Darling, that’s a telegraph pole. It didn’t move.’
‘Not that. The drunk in the ditch!’
The drunk turned out to be Tom Doyle, and instantly Paul’s mood changed again. He accepted the stream of abuse with gravely apologetic good humour. ‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know it was you. Let me help you up.’ He pulled the man out of the ditch and brushed some of the more obvious debris off his battered clothing.
‘Didn’t know it was me?’ He swayed perilously. ‘You mean you drive safely past your friends? Mad, that’s what you are. I thought you’d gone back to London. They’re all mad in London.’ He took a hip flask from his pocket and drank from it. ‘The roads aren’t safe these days. You need a drink to pluck up courage to go home.’
‘Get in, Tom, I’ll drive you home.’
Paul pushed him in from behind while Steve leaned over and helped from the inside of the car. They eventually stretched Tom Doyle out across the back seat, where he lay muttering to himself about drivers driving him to drink. ‘No wonder there’s so much death on the road,’ he said meaningfully.
Steve hunched herself against the door as Paul continued the journey. This was an evening of poise and immaculate turnout. She didn’t want Paul’s wretched friends or murder suspects breathing beer all over her. Or whisky. Whatever it was in the flask. She watched the moon over Fylingdales.
‘What do you want to come back here for?’ Doyle was muttering. ‘Rotten hole. I’d get out myself if it wasn’t for the easy money. Bloody dump. There’s nothing in rotten Dulworth Bay except easy money. Lots of easy money, that’s all.’
‘He’s drunk,’ Steve said distastefully.
‘Must be,’ said Paul. ‘I haven’t noticed any easy money.’
‘If you’ve got your head screwed on!’ said Tom Doyle. He huddled in the corner and closed his eyes. ‘Got to have your head screwed on and your eyes open,’ he muttered. He lifted his feet on to the seat and appeared to fall asleep.
Paul had no idea where Tom Doyle lived, so when they reached Dulworth Bay he had to wake the man up and ask. It took a few moments and some vigorous shaking to revive him.
‘Where am I?’ he demanded blearily. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘You’re in Dulworth,’ said Paul. ‘I don’t know your—’
‘This’ll do.’ They were at the top of the main street running down to the sea. There was a pub opposite with peeling weatherboard, and the sounds of festivity had reached Doyle’s consciousness. ‘How much do I owe you?’
‘We’ll forget about that, Tom,’ he said with a laugh.
‘No we won’t! I’ve got the bloody money and I’ll pay.’ He drew a handful of coins from his pocket. ‘I know how expensive a taxi is to run.’ He thrust a fifty pence piece into Paul’s hand. ‘There! Keep the change.’ He tottered away to the pub muttering about extortion and the high cost of taxis.
Paul drove on. ‘Do you want the window open, darling?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t think so.’ She sighed. ‘Something must be bothering poor Tom Doyle.’
Lord Westerby was a good and portly host. They were waiting for Peter Malo to return from his round of the estate – whatever that meant – before going in to dinner. But His Lordship’s port was the best and he had provided Paul with an Havana cigar. He had complimented Steve on her dress, adding ungraciously that he had assumed she would be a man with a name like Steve.
‘Don’t approve of all these women called Bobbie and Billie and Arthur,’ he barked at Paul. ‘Girl my niece lived with was called Bobbie, and look what happened to her – somebody shot her.’ With some ingenious logic Lord Westerby linked the girl’s death with the fact that young men wear their hair long, then he padded across to the port for a refill.
‘Just been reading your review of that book on crime,’ he called gruffly. ‘Don’t usually read those intellectual weeklies, they’re all pink if you ask me. But I liked your review. Damned amusing!’ He was large and affable and slightly daunting.
‘Thank you,’ said Paul.
‘Not sure that I agree with you about crime being caused by poverty. Crime’s fun, isn’t it? What about the way we behaved at Eton, eh? and in the officers’ mess? We played hell with life and property for the sheer hell of it. Cocking a snoot at society, eh, Mrs Temple?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Paul has argued the same point in his more sober moments. He said that if it’s money you’re after the best thing to do is to get a job.’
‘Crime doesn’t pay, eh?’ He glanced up at the portraits on the walls of eleven previous Lord Westerbys. They shared the plump expression of surprised pain which lurked around the present peer’s eyes. ‘So what is the motive for the mayhem up here in Dulworth? Money or fun?’
‘Money,’ said Paul, ‘in the first place. Although fear has dominated our killer’s activities since Bobbie Jameson was killed. The killer was terrified, for instance, that Miss Maxwell was going to talk, and he spent a lot of unnecessary energy preventing her.’
The door from the hall opened and Diana Maxwell came in looking wraithlike in her long brocade dressing-gown. She was pale and she moved slowly, but otherwise she was as striking as ever. Lord Westerby hurried across to take her arm and lead her to the sofa.
‘Did I hear my name?’ she asked.
‘I was saying,’ said Paul, ‘that Curzon has devoted a lot of time to preventing you from talking to me. But it made no difference. I’ve completed the jigsaw puzzle without your help. The last piece fell into place as we were driving here tonight.’
Diana Maxwell looked apprehensively at her uncle. ‘Do you mean, Mr Temple, that you know who Curzon is?’
‘Not only that, Miss Maxwell, but tomorrow I’ll prove it.’
‘Oh dear.’
Steve leaned forward in her chair. ‘What happened as we were driving here tonight, darling?’
‘Something you said. It was a small, seemingly unimportant thing. You remember I asked you whether you wanted the window open?’
‘I remember. What was so significant about that?’
‘You said no.’
Steve stared in surprise. ‘Good Lord. Yes. Yes, I see what you mean.’ She turned pale as she realised the significance of Paul’s point. ‘But surely that doesn’t mean—’
Lord Westerby slapped his glass on the tray. ‘Damned if I know what you’re all talking about, Temple. I never could do jigsaw puzzles. Shall we go and eat?’ He took Diana Maxwell’s arm. ‘Can’t wait all night for my secretary. He should have been back hours ago.’
At that moment Peter Malo returned, scratched and bruised from an argument with his car. ‘It wouldn’t start,’ he said bitterly. ‘I had to push it up the hill three times and it damned near ran me over. Hello, Temple. Mrs Temple. Sorry if you’re starving on my account.’
Lord Westerby pottered about pouring the young man a sustaining whisky and enjoining him to change before dinner. ‘Peter’s helpless with a car,’ he said, possibly as a joke. ‘If it doesn’t spring to life the moment he presses the starter he flies into an absolute panic.’
‘It looks more as though the car panicked,’ said Steve.
Diana Maxwell dabbed sympathetically at a trickle of blood on Peter Malo’s face. ‘You missed a nicely enigmatic conversation just now, Peter. Mr Temple has been explaining how he knows the identity of Curzon. He’s going to prove it tomorrow.’
‘I don’t believe there is such a person,’ Peter Malo said irritably. ‘It’s a lot of damned nonsense.’
‘You’ll see tomorrow.’
They went through to dinner. Lord Westerby kept the conversation on general topics, such as the youth of today and the British working man, on all of which he had a lot to say. Diana Maxwell was silent through the meal, and Peter Malo when he joined them simply acted as foil to his master’s prejudices. Steve would have been extremely bored, except that the food was delicious and the waiter kept refilling her glass with wine.
By the brandy and coffee stages she had mellowed sufficiently to discuss the contemporary art scene with Peter Malo and find him interesting. They shared disparaging jokes about the minor masters collected by the ninth Lord Westerby for the baronial walls, and they found they both knew Giles Branson of the Branson Galleries. But from the corner of her eye she observed that Paul was chatting up the Maxwell girl. Ten minutes later her husband went arm in arm with the shameless hussy on to the terrace.
‘I’m a grass widow,’ Steve said with a sigh.
Peter Malo laughed. ‘I believe there’s a full moon out there tonight. Diana is terribly subject to lunar influence.’ He poured more brandy and turned the conversation to Picasso.
Lord Westerby remained at the head of the table, staring silently into his empty glass. His ebullience had left him.
On the terrace Paul and Diana Maxwell stood in silence, sipping brandy and listening to the crickets somewhere out on the lawn. Eventually Paul spoke. ‘You think Lord Westerby is Curzon, don’t you?’
She nodded miserably.
‘Supposing you start at the beginning, Miss Maxwell. Tell me why you telephoned that night and arranged to meet me at The Three Boars.’ He sat on the balustrade with his back to the lawn and smiled gently. You did telephone me, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I did,’ she said almost inaudibly.
‘Well?’
She sighed. ‘Well, about three months ago I discovered that my uncle and Peter Malo and Mr Baxter were engaged in a diamond smuggling organisation. Of course, when I found out I went to my uncle and said it had got to stop. I even threatened to call the police.’ She smiled wryly. ‘He affected to be desperately frightened. He said that the leader of the organisation was a notorious criminal called Curzon, and Curzon was the type who would take the law into his own hands by killing anybody who stood in his way.’
She paused and lit a cigarette. ‘I suppose that was true enough. Then about six weeks after the conversation with my uncle a plane crashed along Dulworth cove. Did you know about that?’
Paul said that he did.
‘There was a man on board called Rene Duprez bringing diamonds into the country. He looked after the Amsterdam end of the operation. After the crash both my uncle and Peter tried to find the consignment of diamonds, but apparently Mr Baxter had found them. Baxter had hidden the diamonds, made a note of the hiding-place and then contacted my uncle. There was really quite a scene about it.’
Paul laughed. ‘I believe you.’
‘The row with Baxter went on for several days and then, to my horror, the Baxter boys disappeared. I was convinced that my uncle was responsible and that he was the notorious Curzon. I went down to my flat in London and contacted you.’
‘Why didn’t you meet me?’
She shrugged. ‘Because when I left the telephone box I bumped into Peter Malo. He’d been following me, of course. I took him back to the flat and we talked for a while. It was rather a strange conversation, rather unexpected.’
‘He convinced you that Westerby had nothing to do with the Baxter boys and that he was not responsible for their disappearance?’
‘Yes,’ she said in surprise. ‘When I realised he was telling the truth I let Bobbie go in my place to fob you off, and I went back to Dulworth Bay with Peter.’
Paul asked why it had been necessary to send Bobbie Jameson along as stand-in.
‘Peter was afraid that if nobody turned up at the pub you’d become interested in the Baxter case and discover about Westerby and the Curzon organisation. He told Bobbie to supply you with false information and throw you off the scent.’
‘So why was she murdered?’
‘Because my uncle heard that I’d made an appointment to see you and he wanted to make sure that if I did meet you I shouldn’t talk. Unfortunately he knew nothing about Peter’s arrangement with Bobbie. It was an unnecessary murder.’
‘And I suppose he set fire to the Baxter cottage?’ said Paul.
‘I suppose so. You and Mrs Temple were at the cottage looking after the boys. I suppose my uncle thought you’d be bound to find the notebook if you stayed long enough.’
‘I didn’t even know there was a notebook to find.’
There was a chill in the evening air now and Paul noticed that the girl was shivering. ‘Let’s go back inside,’ he said. ‘You aren’t really better yet, are you?’ He led her back into the drawing-room. ‘I’m grateful to you,’ he murmured, ‘for taking me into your confidence. I wonder whether you could do me one more favour?’
‘Yes?’ she asked.
‘I wonder if you could lend me the use of your yacht tomorrow? I want to give a cocktail party, and it occurred to me that on board your yacht might be the appropriate place.’
‘Of course, Mr Temple.’
Lord Westerby was slumped in an armchair scarcely listening to the fashionable chatter about Picasso’s erotic drawings. Diana Maxwell went and sat on the arm of the chair and ruffled his hair. ‘You’re such a fool,’ she said to him, ‘not at all cut out to be a notorious criminal.’
Paul beckoned to his wife. ‘Let’s go, darling. I’m dead tired and I’ve developed a headache. Let’s go home.’