Unnatural Causes (6 page)

“Well, apparently he didn’t get it back,” said Latham.

“Digby used it to get into the house at about nine o’clock last night. And no one has seen him since. Are you sure the house was empty, Eliza?”

“How could I be? I didn’t go in. But I heard no one and there were no lights.”

“I was there at half past nine this morning,” said Sylvia Kedge. “The front door was locked as usual and the house was empty. None of the beds had been slept in. Mr. Digby hadn’t even poured himself a drink.”

There was an unspoken comment that something sudden and drastic must indeed have occurred. There were surely few crises which Digby Seton would not suitably fortify himself to meet.

But Celia was speaking. “That’s nothing to go by. Digby always carries a hip flask. It was one of those little idiosyncrasies of his that used to irritate Maurice so. But where on earth can he have gone?”

“He didn’t say anything to you about going out again?” Latham turned to Eliza Marley. “How did he seem?”

“No, he didn’t say anything; I’m not particularly perceptive of Digby’s moods but he seemed much as usual.”

“It’s ridiculous!” proclaimed Miss Calthrop. “Digby surely wouldn’t go out again when he’d only just arrived. And where
is there for anyone to go? Are you sure he didn’t mention his plans?”

Elizabeth Marley said: “He may have been called out.”

Her aunt’s voice was sharp. “Called out! Nobody knew he was there! Called out by whom?”

“I don’t know. I only mention it as a possibility. As I was walking back to the car I heard the telephone ring.”

“Are you sure?” asked Latham.

“Why do you keep on asking me if I’m sure? You know what it’s like up there on the headland; the quietness; the loneliness and mystery of the place; the way sound travels at night. I tell you, I heard the phone ring!”

They fell silent. She was right, of course. They knew what it was like on the headland at night. And the same silence, the same loneliness and mystery waited for them outside. Despite the heat of the room Celia Calthrop shivered. But the heat was really getting intolerable.

Bryce had been crouching on a low stool in front of the fire feeding it compulsively from the wood basket like some demonic stoker. The great tongues of flame leapt and hissed around the driftwood; the stone walls of the sitting room looked as if they were sweating blood. Dalgliesh went over to one of the windows and wrestled with the shutters. As he pushed open the pane the waves of sweet cold air passed over him, lifting the rugs on the floor and bringing in like a clap of thunder the surge of the sea.

As he turned again he heard Reckless’s flat unemphatic voice: “I suggest someone takes Miss Kedge home. She looks ill. I shan’t want to talk to her tonight.”

The girl looked as if she were about to remonstrate but Elizabeth Marley said with brief finality: “I’ll take her. I want to get home myself. I’m supposed to be convalescent and this hasn’t exactly been a restful evening, has it? Where’s her coat?”

There was a little spurt of activity. Everyone seemed to feel relief in action and there was much fuss over Sylvia Kedge’s coat, her crutches and her general comfort. Miss Calthrop handed over her car keys and said graciously that she would walk home escorted, of course, by Oliver and Justin. Sylvia Kedge, surrounded by a bodyguard of helpers, began to hobble her way to the door.

It was then that the telephone rang. Immediately the little party froze into a tableau of apprehension. The raucous sound, at once so ordinary and so ominous, petrified them into silence. Miss Dalgliesh had moved to the telephone and lifted the receiver when Reckless rose swiftly and without apology took it from her hand.

They could make little of the conversation, which on Reckless’s part was conducted briefly and in monosyllables. He seemed to be speaking to a police station. For most of the time he listened in silence interspersed with grunts. He ended: “Right. Thank you. I shall be seeing him at Seton House first thing in the morning. Good night.” He replaced the receiver and turned to face the waiting company who were making no effort to hide their anxiety. Dalgliesh half-expected him to disappoint them but instead he said: “We’ve found Mr. Digby Seton. He has telephoned Lowestoft Police Station to say that he was admitted to hospital last night after driving his car into a ditch on the Lowestoft road. They are discharging him first thing tomorrow morning.”

Miss Calthrop’s mouth had opened for the inevitable question when he added: “His story is that someone telephoned him just after nine o’clock last night to ask him to go at once to Lowestoft Police Station to identify his brother’s body. The caller told him that Mr. Maurice Seton’s corpse had come ashore in a dinghy with both hands chopped off at the wrists.”

Latham said incredulously: “But that’s impossible! I thought you said the body wasn’t found until early this evening?”

“Nor was it, Sir. No one telephoned from the Lowestoft Police yesterday night. No one knew what had happened to Mr. Maurice Seton until his body came ashore this evening. Except one person, of course.”

He looked round at them, the melancholy eyes moving speculatively from face to face. No one spoke or moved. It was as if they were all fixed in a moment of time waiting helplessly for some unavoidable cataclysm. It was a moment for which no words seemed adequate; it cried out for action, for drama. And Sylvia Kedge, as if obligingly doing her best, slid with a moan from Eliza’s supporting arms and crumpled to the floor.

Reckless said: “He died at midnight on Tuesday, give or take an hour. That’s my guess based on the stage of rigor and the general look of him. I shall be surprised if the PM doesn’t confirm it. The hands were taken off sometime after death. There wasn’t much bleeding but it looked as if the seat of the dinghy had been used as a chopping block. Assuming that Mr. Bryce was telling the truth and the dinghy was still beached here at five o’clock Wednesday afternoon, he was almost certainly pushed out to sea after the tide turned an hour later. The butchery must have been done after dusk. But he had been dead then for the best part of eighteen hours, maybe longer. I don’t know where he died or how he died. But I shall find out.”

The three policemen were together in the sitting room. Jane Dalgliesh had made an excuse to leave them alone by offering them coffee; from the kitchen Dalgliesh could hear the faint tinkling sounds of its preparation. It was over ten minutes since the rest of the company had left. It had required little time or effort to revive Sylvia Kedge and once she and Liz Marley were
on their way, there had been a general tacit agreement that the excitements of the evening might now be drawn to a close. The visitors looked suddenly bedraggled with weariness. When Reckless, as if gaining energy and animation from their exhaustion, began to question them about a possible weapon, he was met by weary incomprehension. No one seemed able to remember whether he or she owned a chopper, a cleaver or an axe, where these implements were kept or when they had last been used. No one except Jane Dalgliesh. And even Miss Dalgliesh’s calm admission that she had lost a chopper from her woodshed some months previously provoked no more than mild interest. The company had had enough of murder for one night. Like overexcited children at the end of the party, they wanted to go home.

It was not until Miss Dalgliesh had also left them that Reckless spoke of the case. This was to be expected but Dalgliesh was irritated to discover how much he resented the obvious implication. Reckless was presumably neither stupid nor crassly insensitive. He would utter no warnings. He wouldn’t antagonise Dalgliesh by inviting a discretion and cooperation which both of them knew he had the right to take for granted. But this was his case. He was in charge. It was for him to decide at leisure which pieces of the puzzle he would lay out for Dalgliesh’s inspection; how much he would confide and to whom. The situation was a novel one for Dalgliesh and he wasn’t sure he was going to like it.

The room was still very close. The fire was dying now into a pyramid of white ash but the heat trapped between the stone walls beat on their faces as if from an oven and the air smelt heavy. The Inspector seemed unaffected by it. He said: “These people who were here this evening, Mr. Dalgliesh. Tell me about them. Do they all call themselves writers?”

Dalgliesh replied: “I imagine that Oliver Latham would call himself a dramatic critic. Miss Calthrop likes to be known as a romantic novelist, whatever that may mean. I don’t know what Justin Bryce would call himself. He edits a monthly literary and political review which was founded by his grandfather.”

Reckless said surprisingly: “I know. The
Monthly Critical Review
. My father used to take it. That was in the days when sixpence meant something to a working man. And for sixpence the
Monthly Crit
. gave you the message, warm and strong. Nowadays it’s about as pink as the
Financial Times;
advice on your investments, reviews of books which nobody wants to read; cosy competitions for the intelligentsia. He can’t make a living out of that.”

Dalgliesh replied that, so far from making a living, Bryce was known to subsidise the review from his private income.

Reckless said: “He’s apparently one of those men who don’t mind people thinking he’s a queer. Is he, Mr. Dalgliesh?”

It was not an irrelevant question. Nothing about a suspect’s character is irrelevant in a murder investigation, and the case was being treated as one of murder. But, irrationally, Dalgliesh was irritated. He replied: “I don’t know. He may be a little ambivalent.”

“Is he married?”

“Not as far as I know. But we surely haven’t yet reached the point when every bachelor over forty is automatically suspect?”

Reckless did not reply. Miss Dalgliesh had returned with the tray of coffee and he accepted a cup with grave thanks but with no appearance of really wanting it. When she had again left them he began noisily sipping; his sombre eyes above the rim of the cup fixed on a water-colour of avocets in flight by Jane Dalgliesh which hung on the opposite wall. He said: “They’re a spiteful lot, queers. Not violent on the whole.
But spiteful. And there was a spiteful crime. That secretary girl, the cripple. Where does she come from, Mr. Dalgliesh?”

Dalgliesh, feeling like a candidate at a viva voce examination, said calmly: “Sylvia Kedge is an orphan who lives alone in a cottage in Tanner’s Lane. She is said to be a highly competent shorthand typist. She worked chiefly for Maurice Seton but she does quite a bit for Miss Calthrop and Bryce. I know very little about her, about any of them.”

“You know enough for my needs at present, Mr. Dalgliesh. And Miss Marley?”

“Also an orphan. Her aunt brought her up. At present she’s at Cambridge.”

“And all these people are friends of your aunt?”

Dalgliesh hesitated. Friendship was not a word his aunt used easily and he thought it doubtful whether she would in fact speak of more than one person at Monksmere as a friend. But one does not willingly deny one’s acquaintances when they are about to be suspected of murder. Resisting the temptation to reply that they knew each other intimately but not well, he said cautiously: “You had better ask my aunt. But they all know each other. After all, it’s a small and isolated community. They manage to get on together.”

Reckless said: “When they’re not killing each other’s animals.” Dalgliesh didn’t reply. Reckless added: “They weren’t particularly upset were they? Not a word of regret the whole evening. Being writers you’d think one of them might have managed a stylish little epitaph.”

“Miss Kedge took it badly,” suggested Dalgliesh.

“That wasn’t grief. That was shock. Clinical shock. If she isn’t better tomorrow someone should get a doctor to her.”

He was right, of course, thought Dalgliesh. It had been shock. And that in itself was interesting. Certainly the evening’s
news had been shocking enough, but would it have been quite so shocking to someone to whom it wasn’t news? There had been nothing faked about that final faint and it hardly suggested guilty knowledge.

Suddenly Reckless got up from his chair, looked at his empty cup as if uncertain how it came to be in his hand and replaced it with slow deliberation on the coffee tray. Sergeant Courtney, after a moment’s hesitation, did the same with his. It looked as if they were at last preparing to go. But first there was something which Reckless had to be told. Since it was a perfectly straightforward piece of information which might or might not prove to be important, Dalgliesh was irritated at his reluctance to get it out. He told himself that the next few days were going to be difficult enough without letting Reckless inveigle him into a mood of morbid self-analysis. Firmly he said: “There’s something you ought to know about that fake manuscript. I may be wrong—there’s not a lot to go on—but I think I recognise the description of the nightclub. It sounds like the Cortez Club in Soho, L. J. Luker’s place. You probably remember the case. It was in 1959. Luker shot his partner, was sentenced to death, but was released when the verdict was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal.”

Reckless said slowly: “I remember Luker. Mr. Justice Brothwick’s case wasn’t it? The Cortez Club would be a useful place to know if you were hoping to pin a murder on someone. And Luker would be as good a man to pin it on as any.”

He walked to the door, his Sergeant following him like a shadow. Then he turned for a last word. “I can see that it’s going to be a great advantage having you here, Mr. Dalgliesh.”

He made it sound like an insult.

The contrast between the brightness of the sitting room and the cool darkness of the autumn night was absolute. It was like stepping into a pit. As the door of Pentlands closed behind them Celia Calthrop experienced a moment of blind panic. The night pressed around her. She breathed darkness like a physical weight. It was as if the air had thickened with night, had become a heaviness through which she had to fight her way. There was no longer direction nor distance. In this black and numinous void the sullen, melancholy thudding of the sea sounded on all sides, so that she felt menaced and rooted like a lost traveller on some desolate shore. When Latham shone his torch on the path the ground looked unreal and very far away like the surface of the moon. It was impossible that human feet could make contact with this remote and insubstantial soil. She stumbled and would have lost her balance if Latham hadn’t gripped her arm with sudden and surprising force.