Frequent Hearses (2 page)

“You mean”—Humbleby spoke with something of an effort—“you mean the Borgia?”

“Don’t be so ridiculous, Humbleby,” said Fen. “Do you really imagine they’ve called in a Professor of English to instruct them about the Borgias? No, I mean the poet, of course.”

“That was my first thought”—Humbleby was aggrieved—“but naturally I rejected it out of hand. There’s nothing in Pope’s life that anyone could possibly make a commercial film of.”

“So one would imagine.” Fen shook his head gloomily. “None the less, a film is in fact going to be made. And the reason for that—”

He checked himself in order to flourish a mandatory finger at the studio gate, where they had now arrived. They swerved in past the disregard of a gatekeeper in a sort of sentry-box. Passes were supposed to be shown, but except on the days when extras were being interviewed this rule was seldom enforced. “The reason for that,” Fen repeated doggedly, “is as follows. A few months ago Andrew Leiper died, and his brother—”

But Humbleby was not attending. Instead, he was searching for a gap in the line of expensive-looking cars—monuments, many of these, to an involved scheme for hoodwinking the Inland Revenue Department which were parked, nose inward, along the front of the studios. Presently he found one and scraped into it.

“Yes?” he said encouragingly. “You were saying?”

“I was saying that this company used to be owned by a man called Andrew Leiper. Andrew Leiper died recently, however, and the company, along with his other interests, was inherited by his elder brother Giles.”

And Fen pointed to the facade above them, where a group of workmen were engaged—and in their leisurely way had been engaged for the past three weeks—in substituting, in the great gilt-letter sign
ANDREW LEIPER FILMS INC.,
the word
GILES
for the word
ANDREW
.
“Si monumentum requiris…”

“Just so.” Humbleby switched off his engine, removed the cheroot from his mouth, and examined the end of it attentively. “But as to the immediate relevance of the situation you describe—”

“We’re coming to that… Now, Giles’s sole claim to distinction is that he’s a literary crank. He believes, for instance, that the Earl of Rutland wrote Shakespeare’s plays (with the exception of
The Tempest,
which he ascribes to Beaumont and Fletcher), and he’s published a nasty little book which purports to prove it. He believes that Dryden was impotent, and that incestuous relations between Emily and Bramwell were responsible for
Wuthering Heights.
In fact, I’m inclined to think that he believes that it was Bramwell, and not Emily, who actually wrote
Wuthering Heights…
But all that’s by the way. The point is that Giles Leiper has ideas about Pope, too. Do you know the
Ode to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady?”

“Dr. Johnson,” said Humbleby with the cautious deliberation of one who treads slippery conversational ground, “interpreted it as an apologia for suicide.”

“So he did. And—”

“But I like it,” said Humbleby, suddenly enthusiastic. “I like it very much indeed.
‘What beck’ning ghost,”’
he intoned dramatically,
“‘along the moonlight shade Invites my something something something glade. ‘Tis she!—but why that bleeding—”’

“Please, please.” Fen fished a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his coat and lit one. “Your recollection of the piece seems to be very indistinct. I’d better explain what it’s about. It concerns—”

“There’s not the least necessity—”

“It is an Elegy to a girl who has killed herself as a result of being—um—callously deserted by her husband. The poet—”

“I remember it very clearly,” said Humbleby. “Very clearly indeed.”

“The poet, in addition to deploring this situation, announces his belief that vengeance will overtake not only the husband, but the whole of his family as well.”

“‘While the long funerals,”’
chanted Humbleby in solemn antiphon,
“‘darken all the way.’”

“Blacken
all the way,
blacken…
The girl may have been a Mrs. Weston, by birth a Miss Gage. But that’s conjectural. The poem was almost certainly a mere imaginative exercise, and there’s not the smallest evidence that Pope was in any way personally involved. Which brings us to Giles Leiper.”

“Brings us, at long last, to Giles Leiper.”

“Leiper believes, along with his other fatuities, that Pope was personally involved. Not long ago, in fact, he wrote an article in some tawdry journal or other stating his conviction that Pope had had an affair with this girl, and that that was why he was so upset about her death.
‘Are we to understand,’”
Fen quoted with repugnance, ”
‘that a poem as deeply felt as this was no more than a callous exercise in versification? Is it not much more in accordance with our knowledge of poets and poetry to assume that Pope was intimately interested in the lady?’”

“Well, isn’t it?” said Humbleby, taken genuinely unawares.

“No, it isn’t. And even if it were, there’s not, in this case, the smallest justification for imagining that Pope’s connection with the girl was anything but platonic… Anyway, it’s this supposititious affair that the film is chiefly about—though a lot of other things come into it, of course.” Fen considered these, not without pleasure. “There’s Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. There are Addison and Swift—Swift is depicted as walking about the country all day, writing
Gulliver,
thinking erotic thoughts about Stella, and having little preliminary or proleptic fits of madness. There’s also, and somewhat anachronistically, Bolingbroke.”

Humbleby chuckled. “And Dryden and Wycherley,” he said, “and Handel and Gay and Queen Anne. I mustn’t miss this film. How far has it got?”

“It’s not on the floor yet.”

“On the
floor?”

“Yes, I’m sorry: their damnable jargon is infectious. I mean that they haven’t actually started making it yet. We’re still at the stage of script conferences.” And Fen glanced at his watch. “There’s one this morning—which is why I’m here.”

Humbleby threw the end of his cheroot out of the window. “You’re not in a hurry, I hope?”

“Not specially, no. Before I go, tell me what you’re doing here. If it isn’t confidential, that is.”

“No, it isn’t confidential.” At the reminder of his mission a certain sombreness had invaded Humbleby’s bland countenance. “And knowing these people, you may possibly be able to help me.”

“A crime?”

“Suicide is a crime, yes. But there’s nothing special about this one, except that the poor wretch was so very young, and thought better of it at the last moment—though too late to save herself…” And Humbleby braced himself, as a man braces himself when confronted with a necessary but wholly disagreeable task. “Tell me,” he said, “have you ever come across a girl called Gloria Scott?”

A group of cleaners—stolid, morose, elderly women—drifted in at the studio gate; their voices, exchanging laborious witticisms with the gatekeeper, rasped unpleasantly through the limpid morning air. The men on the scaffolding had ceased work and were recouping their energies with cold tea. A distant succession of reverberating bumps suggested that someone was loading or unloading balks of timber. And as Humbleby spoke, the shadow of a great cloud curtained the studios from north to south, so that, by contrast, the low hills where the sun still shone glittered like polished metal.

“Gloria Scott?” Fen echoed. “No, I’m afraid the name doesn’t convey anything to me.”

Humbleby was absently fingering the lapel of his light-grey overcoat. “I’m not clear,” he said, “as to whether she actually worked here or not. But it was from here that Miss—um”—he consulted with his memory—“Miss Flecker rang up to identify her. Perhaps you know Miss Flecker?”

“No, I don’t,” said Fen restively. “And all this means nothing to me, nothing. Explain, please.”

“You’ve seen this morning’s paper?”

“The
Times
and the
Mail
only.”

“The
Mail
had it in. A photograph of this girl, with a request for identification.”

Fen produced the paper from his pocket and hunted through it. “There,” said Humbleby, pointing.

The photograph was of a pretty, sulky-looking girl in her late teens. It was a portrait of that contrived and glamorous sort favoured by the acting profession, with the lips, nose, neck, and breasts sharply outlined by careful lighting. The accompanying letterpress was scant, conveying no more than that the police wished to know who she was.

“There’s a sense in which one recognises her, of course,” said Fen thoughtfully. “You can see that photograph—or something pretty well indistinguishable from it—outside almost every repertory theatre in the country… What was she—brunette, red-head, mousy? They all come out the same in black-and-white photographs.”

“Auburn, when I saw her. Saturated auburn, with a dressing of Thames mud and Thames weed.”

Fen glanced at him sympathetically. “Well?” he said. “What about it?”

“It happened early yesterday morning—that’s to say, during the night before last, at about 2 a.m. A taxi picked this girl up at the Piccadilly end of Half Moon Street, where she was talking to some man whom the driver didn’t particularly notice. She asked to be taken to an address in Stamford Street, on the other side of the river. Then, when they were in the middle of Waterloo Bridge, she told the driver to stop. She was a good deal overwrought, it seems, and the driver didn’t immediately start off again when she’d paid him. He watched her run towards the parapet, and as soon as he realised what she was going to do, he ran after her. The bridge was almost deserted, but there was a police-car coming across it, and the people in that saw what happened. The taxi-driver made a grab at her as she went over, but it was too late. She came up once, and screamed—she’d fallen flat on the surface of the water, and you know what that does to you when you fall from a height. One of the men in the police-car dived in after her, but she was dead when he got her ashore.”

The cleaners had disappeared inside the studios. A shooting-brake, crammed with carpenters in overalls, emerged noisily from a hidden entrance to the left. But Fen hardly noticed it: in imagination he stood on the vacant, lamplit expanses of Waterloo Bridge, peering over the parapet at a figure which floundered through the shallows and the mud, dragging after him the limp, rent body of an auburn-haired girl… The cloud, driven hapless towards the north-west, had unveiled the sun again; yet for all that Fen shivered slightly, feeling on his mouth the night wind and in his nostrils the smell of the river at low tide. Such visions were not, of course, germane to the matter in hand: they would certainly be distorted, certainly incomplete. But it was with a curious reluctance that he put them aside…

“Yes,” he said. “Go on.”

Humbleby shifted uneasily—conscious, perhaps, that it is when a man is most sincere that he is apt to sound most histrionic.

“The whole business,” he said, “was dealt with, of course, by the Divisional Superintendent. And he happens to be my brother-in-law—years ago, when he was only a sergeant, we were on a case together, and he met my sister at my flat and fell for her, God help him… Anyway, I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and being on holiday, I dropped in at the station yesterday morning, and he told me all about it. As you’ll have guessed, it was identifying the girl that was the difficulty. She’d dropped her handbag on the bridge, but there wasn’t anything at all revealing in it except for the photograph, and that didn’t have the photographer’s name on it. And her clothes were all new and not marked, so they didn’t help either.”

“But the address,” said Fen, a little surprised at Humbleby’s ignoring what seemed the first and most obvious line of approach to the problem. “The address she gave to the taxi-driver.”

“Useless. We found it all right, but it didn’t help us to identify her. She’d only moved in there the previous afternoon, and hadn’t so far either signed the register or handed over her ration-book. She’d told the landlady her name, of course, but the landlady was deaf and didn’t catch it… It really looked as if the Fates were in a conspiracy to make trouble for us.”

“But her belongings—papers and so forth…”

“Ah, yes. This is where the one really odd feature of the affair comes in.” And Humbleby paused, not displeased at having something mildly bizarre to relate. “By the time we got to it, her room and her things had been searched.”

A ragged flight of blackbirds passed overhead, peering inquisitively down at the studio roofs. In a window in the wall directly facing them, a smooth-looking young man appeared, gazed at them suspiciously, muttered something to a companion invisible behind him, and vanished again. Humbleby, distrait, was playing with the door-handle. He was not normally a fidgety man, and Fen interpreted this as a sign of considerable perturbation.

“Searched?” he said. “Searched for what?”

“For signs of identification. Everything of that sort—papers, photographs, the fly-leaves of one or two books—had been removed and taken away. The laundry-marks had been cut out of all the clothes and the paper lining of the lid of a suitcase, which had obviously had a name and address on it, had been torn out. And whoever did it was thorough. We weren’t able to find a single thing he’d missed.”

“But that’s extraordinary,” said Fen rather blankly. “If she’d been murdered, now… But I suppose there’s no doubt—”

“None whatever. She killed herself all right. But mind you, there might quite well be someone who didn’t want her motive for killing herself to become known, and chose this rather oblique way of—um—occluding it… For instance, it’s possible she was pregnant. We shall know about that when the autopsy report comes in.”

Fen nodded. “Odd,” he commented. “And interesting in so far as whoever was responsible must surely have realised that there was a very fair chance, in spite of all his efforts, of her being identified in the end. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“You say you’ve now discovered that her name was Gloria Scott?”

“That’s what this Miss Flecker said over the phone.”