Death of an Author, page 3
Looking at his unconventional little party seated at the dinner table, Marriott thought that here was material for the novelist in the personalities of these two writers alone. Vivian Lestrange was dressed in the simplest of black georgette frocks, which fitted her slender body like a bud sheath. Her arms and shoulders were victoriously white, and her golden head so well shaped, that Marriott—who hated ‘mannish’ women—had to admit that the boyish crop became her. She wore long earrings of deep blue lapis lazuli, and a necklace of the same stones around the base of her rounded throat; her lips were reddened to just the degree compatible with artistry, and her skin smoothly powdered so that it had a damask quality.
Michael Ashe was a big fellow, with tanned face and slightly grizzled fair hair. He had the long head and large bones of a Norseman, and his blue eyes sometimes surveyed the young woman opposite to him with a boldness that might have been resented by any woman less cool and self-contained than the plain-spoken object of it.
Marriott felt a few qualms at one period, as though he had been playing with forces which he was unable to control. Ashe was no Puritan, and Vivian Lestrange was provocative enough to challenge the devil in him. Yet Marriott took comfort from the very coolness of the young woman. Here was no inexperienced girl to lose her head over a dominating man; remembering the phrase she had used during their first meeting, Marriott chuckled to himself. “Ashe has met his Waterloo. It’ll be amusing to see how he takes it.”
When Vivian Lestrange rose to go,—shortly after eleven o’clock, Ashe asked if he might drive her home, but she refused his offer with characteristic directness, and asked for a taxi. As she said good night to him she added,
“You have been entrusted with a secret tonight, because Mr. Marriott,—who is my very dear friend—answered for your integrity. If at any time, I hear a rumour that Vivian Lestrange is a woman, I shall know whence that rumour came, and I shall say two words,—‘Male conceit.’ We know that no woman can keep a secret, for men have told us so. Look to your laurels, oh man of integrity!”
“You can trust me, in this!” said Ashe, his blue eyes very bright and smiling, “but this dismissal is altogether too uncompromising. When do we meet again?”
“Who knows?” she laughed. “I am a recluse,—as Mr. Marriott will have told you. I came out this evening to meet Michael Ashe. As the Quakers say, ‘I had a concern to know him.’ I have enjoyed this evening, but I am going home again to think. Despite the adage about women’s intuition, I base my behaviour on considered judgments. For the moment, good-bye.”
She thanked Andrew Marriott very prettily for his hospitality, and held old Bailley’s hand in her own with a warmth that made Ashe’s sullen blue eyes flicker beneath their shaggy brows: her exit had all the cool finished grace which made her every action charming, and a curious flatness seemed to fall on the three men after she had left.
Marriott offered Ashe another whisky and soda, saying:
“Well. Now you know.”
“Know what?” demanded Ashe. “That young woman would take the devil of a lot of knowing. I’m left guessing.”
“A charming personality!” put in Bailley. “Damn it! one of the most delightful women I’ve ever met. She can be as feminist as she likes in theory, provided she’s as attractive as that in practice. It’s a pity she’s so obstinate about hiding herself; that girl would take literary London by storm.”
“Girl indeed!” retorted Ashe. “Not much girlish about that…”
Seeing Marriott’s expression, he broke off and then continued less aggressively.
“Vivian Lestrange wants to have everything her own way; she claims intellectual equality with men while seeing to it that she maintains her privileges as a woman. If I had taken her at her own valuation and talked to her regardless of her sex, I should have stripped her pretensions naked. She hedges herself about with the bars of polite conventions, and then bleats about sex equality. God!”
Bailley uttered a little deprecating cough.
“My dear fellow, Miss Lestrange held a brief for one sort of equality only,—intellectual equality. She denied that it was possible to tell a woman’s writing from a man’s,—and her point was proved by her own work before you ever heard her put the argument into words. Further than that, she made no attempt to urge the matter. Moreover, she stressed the fact that it was only under modern conditions of civilisation that that equality could emerge. It’s no use applying the criteria of the stone age to this discussion. We are a civilised community…”
“You’re a damned old fool, Bailley!” said Ashe cheerfully. “You may be civilised. I’m not. Intelligence and civilisation aren’t synonymous. Well, thanks very much for a very interesting and instructive evening. Like the lady in the case, I’m going home to think.”
When Ashe also had taken his departure, Marriott rumpled up his grey hair in some perplexity.
“An interesting and instructive evening, certainly,” he began and Bailley put in,
“But you’re not over happy in your mind about it? Neither am I.”
Marriott did not deny this. “He doesn’t know where she lives,” he observed, “and I fail to see how he’s going to find out… I don’t think he’ll gossip, he has too much regard for his own reputation as a keeper of secrets.”
Bailley began to chuckle, and then throwing back his head he laughed till he shook.
“Male conceit!” he ejaculated between spasms of mirth. “Male conceit! The impertinence of the hussy!”
The other’s laughter was infectious, and Marriott began to chuckle too, but more restrainedly.
“It’s as natural to assume conceit in an individual as to assume a centre to a circle,” he pronounced, and Bailley gave him a dig in the ribs.
“Anatole France originated that,” he commented, “not you, my boy. Another spot, Andrew. We’ll drink to ‘male conceit’!”
Chapter III
It was on a Monday evening, some three months after Andrew Marriott’s dinner party, that a young woman walked into Hampstead Police Station and asked to see the officer in charge. Sergeant Lumsden,—stout, observant, and polite,—smiled down on her benevolently.
“The Inspector’s busy, Miss. Anything I can do for you?”
“Not unless you’d like to help me in a job of housebreaking,” replied the visitor. “You see, Sergeant, the trouble isn’t all my own, it’s rather a confidential sort of trouble, and I don’t want to go dropping bricks.”
“Quite so, missy,” replied the rather mystified, but still benevolent, sergeant. “Nasty things to drop, bricks. Now if you’d give me some idea of the trouble, so as to let the Inspector judge the importance of it for himself as it were? Is it what you’d call a criminal matter, or just a nuisance?”
“Well, it’s certainly a nuisance,—in fact a damned nuisance,” replied the lady, “also it may be a crime. Tell the Inspector that a respectable woman wants to see him about a matter of suspected murder or kidnapping,—a disappearance in other words. Here’s my card, and tell him I’m perfectly compos mentis.”
The sergeant gasped a little. “Look here, Miss. Our Inspector’s not the sort what likes practical jokes.”
“Neither do I. In fact I hate them,” was the retort. “Tell him that, too, if you like.”
Something in her voice, despite her nonchalant bearing, made the sergeant take in the card to his superior officer, and a few moments later the visitor was seated on a hard chair in a very bare office, facing a competent looking man in uniform, whose expression was more severe than benevolent.
“Yes, madam?” he enquired.
His visitor took a deep breath, as one about to plunge.
“My name is Eleanor Clarke, and I am secretary to Vivian Lestrange who lives at Temple Grove. I have come here because I can’t get any answer at my employer’s house, and I’m afraid something serious must have happened to him.”
“Why do you suppose that?” asked the Inspector sceptically. The woman facing him had clasped her ungloved hands in her lap, and Inspector Bond noticed that her knuckles showed white, so tightly were her hands clenched together.
“Mr. Lestrange is rather eccentric, and he never goes out anywhere,” she said. “His house is run by a woman named Mrs. Fife, who comes each morning at eight o’clock and stays until eight in the evening. I go to the house at ten o’clock every morning. This morning I went as usual, but I could not get any answer when I rang and knocked. I went for a walk and came back in half an hour’s time, and could still get no answer. Then I noticed that the morning’s milk had not been taken in, and the butcher boy, who came up while I was there, said he could get no answer, either. Then I decided to go and see Mrs. Fife. She had given me her address as 28 Canterbury Villas. When I got there I found no one had ever heard of her.”
“I expect you made a mistake about the number,” said the Inspector, but she shook her head and produced a slip of paper from her bag.
“No,” she replied. “I made her write it down. It’s quite clear.”
The Inspector studied his visitor thoughtfully.
“Very well, Miss Clarke. You say that you made this discovery this morning; it is now six o’clock. Why did you not report the circumstances earlier if you felt they called for investigation?”
“Because I didn’t want to make a fool of myself,” retorted the other with some heat. “My employer is eccentric. He is a recluse, he never goes out, and he never receives visitors. He is a writer and he has a horror of publicity. No one knows who he is. You could ask every journalist in London about Vivian Lestrange—they would all know his name, but none of them have ever seen him, neither do they know anything about him. They’d give their ears—every man Jack of them—to know who he is. Now can you understand why I spent the day wandering about in a perfect turmoil of fear and indecision? If I came to you, I gave away my employer’s secret which I am pledged to respect. Whatever I did, whatever plan I made, seemed to lead me into a worse mess. I came here at last because I had to do something,—and because I’ve always believed that the English police are fair and considerate. I had to tell somebody, and of all the alternatives I considered, the police seemed the least bad.”
Bond could not help smiling, but his smile was quickly suppressed.
“Considering that you are practically an inmate of the house, didn’t you consider that you would be justified in trying to force an entry?” he enquired, and she almost cried out at him:
“Oh, don’t be silly! I’d have done anything,—or smashed anything,—to get inside, but it’s impossible. There’s a ten foot wall round three sides of the garden with revolving spikes on top of it. The fourth side is closed in by the blank wall of Lee-Vernon’s studio. If I’d gone to a builder and told him to bring ladders to help me climb the wall, the story would have been all over Hampstead in half an hour,—and Mr. Lestrange’s secret with it. He wouldn’t let any of the tradesmen come inside the gate, they’d never seen him, and they don’t know he exists. Mrs. Fife and I do all the ordering and pay all the bills.”
The Inspector still regarded her critically. “Your employer gave you no hint that he might be going away?”
“The man thinks I’m an idiot,” groaned Eleanor Clarke, and it was obvious that she did not refer to her employer. “Do you think I should have come to you with a yarn like this in order to get the sack from a very good job? Can’t you realise that Mr. Lestrange was in the middle of a book, that we worked hard all Saturday and that he was crazy to get on with it? I’m his amanuensis,—I do all the writing and the typing. His hands are all stiff with rheumatism. Going away! Powers above! I shall burst in a minute!”
“You forget that I’m not a clairvoyant,” said Bond calmly. “I can realise just as many facts as you choose to tell me, but it’s not my business to anticipate them. Taking into consideration the evidence you have given, I will see that the matter is investigated. I should like the names of Mr. Lestrange’s next of kin, if you know them?”
Eleanor Clarke sighed.
“And so should I,—and so would Fleet Street, and so would Langston’s, and so ad infinitum!” she retorted. “He has no kin. I can’t give you the name of a soul who knows him, because nobody does. No one ever comes to see him, and I’ve never written a personal letter for him all the time I’ve known him,—and that’s three years.”
“This is a very strange story,” said Bond.
“It is,” she replied, “in fact it’s a Lestrange story! Here’s another item of information for you. If you ring up Fleet Street and tell them what I’ve told you, you’ll be in a position to retire on your winnings. Vivian Lestrange is NEWS!—news with capital letters and Fleet Street pays for news…”
“We are not in the habit of ringing up Fleet Street to augment our pay,” said Bond calmly, and she replied:
“I know you’re not. That’s why I came here. The story I’ve told you is the best compliment the Metropolitan Police have ever been paid.”
Bond looked down his nose and did not acknowledge the politeness.
“I take it that you have already advised your employer’s publishers?” he enquired, and Miss Clarke gave a deep sigh.
“It’s no use doing that,” she said. “Langston’s know me as Vivian Lestrange. At his wish I have always deputised for him, because he had this queer complex about hiding himself. If either of Langston’s managers were here they would identify me as Vivian Lestrange… Now can you see the sort of mess I’m in?” she burst out. “I’ve been wondering all day how I could best disappear, and each time I realised that I couldn’t do it until I’d been inside the house to find out what had happened. Haven’t you any imagination?” she pleaded. “Can’t you realise that something horrible may have happened behind that wall?”
“My business is to deal with facts,” replied Bond. “Will you kindly tell me this. How many people know that your employer, Mr. Vivian Lestrange, really exists?”
“I know it, Mrs. Fife knows it, and you know it,” she replied. “Apart from us, I don’t know anybody else who does. Oh, don’t say you’re not going to do anything! I shall scream in a minute! I have been working myself up all day to find the courage to come here, and now you’re not going to believe me!”
Bond gave the least shrug of his broad shoulders.
“I have cast no aspersions on your veracity,” he began, and Eleanor Clarke began to laugh.
“You’re word perfect!” she exclaimed between gusts of laughter. “Never mind about the aspersions. Come and find out.”
In reply, Bond took up his pen and deliberately began to make notes.
“Your name and address, please?” he demanded acidly. “Since the situation has already waited all day to be dealt with, a few moments more or less will not greatly affect it.”
Realising that her nervous mockery was having the opposite of the effect she intended, Eleanor Clarke made an effort to reply in a more seemly manner. Bond’s notes did not take long, and then he got up and reached for his uniform cap.
“I will ask you to accompany me to the house in a few moments,” he said stiffly, and left her by herself in the dreary little office.
About a quarter of an hour later two cars drew up in the quiet little cul-de-sac where stood Temple Grove. The first was a light van, with a couple of ladders loaded into it; the second a closed car in which Inspector Bond and a constable accompanied Eleanor Clarke. Before he alighted, Bond turned to his visitor.
“You will kindly stay here for the moment,” he said. “I will tell you when you are needed.”
He got out and went to the door in the wall, knocked and rang, and then waited. Receiving no answer, he beckoned to the two men in the van, and they began to unload the ladders. Eleanor Clarke sat still in the car, twisting her fingers together, her face white now, as she watched the men erect a ladder against the wall; then one of them mounted it and hauled up the other ladder, which he negotiated with some difficulty over the revolving spikes, and finally got it down on the other side of the wall. Then Bond climbed up, surmounted the spikes neatly, and descended on the other side, followed by Constable Hewitt.
Bond was a very efficient police officer. If pedantic of speech and apparently slow in taking decisions, he was neither as unobservant nor as unimaginative as Eleanor Clarke had judged him to be. He had watched her pretty closely, and he knew that her flippant speech was partly due to nerves, but he had already adjudged the whole story to be the result of nerves. He thought that this was a matter of hysteria, and that Miss Clarke’s story would prove to be another of those cases—well known to the police—when an informant tells some mysterious narrative which proves to have no foundation in fact. Bond had read a little psychology, and knew something of the mental conditions which led to the loss of memory on the one hand, and claims to notoriety on the other. Consequently he climbed over the wall in a state of mind coldly sceptical, and looked around the pleasant little garden placidly enough, while the big constable followed him over the wall. Temple Grove was a comfortable little two-storied house, standing in its own garden and entirely concealed from the road. The house faced south, and at the end of the garden rose the blank studio wall which Eleanor Clarke had mentioned. It was covered with creepers and a fine wistaria tree, which had just broken into flower. One side of the garden was bounded by the road, and close clipped lime trees concealed it from the adjacent house on the other side.
By the time Constable Hewitt had joined him, Bond was staring at the french window which opened on to the lawn, and Hewitt, following the Inspector’s glance, gave a grunt.
“Something in it?” he enquired, for the glass of the window was starred by radiating cracks, and a round black hole showed clearly in the evening light.
