Songs in the Key of Death (15 page)

“I am only here one day but it is very good. The people are so friendly.”

“Famous for it,” the man said. “And where’s home?”

“I come from Hamburg. That is in Germany.”

“I know where Hamburg is.”

“Ah, you have been there?”

“Yes, but not to stay. I flew over in a Lancaster, long before you were born. All I saw was a lot of fires burning.” He was well away on the beer and the effect of it could be heard in his voice.

Meredith paused, looking at her hands. Then she said, “It was, as you say, before I was born. But I find it hard to believe that our people could be enemies.”

“My dear,” the man said, “you are not going to find anybody to be your enemy.”

She laughed at that and their foreheads almost touched as they leaned close together. Tennyson listened to a lot more of the same and then, when the two of them left the pub, he was relieved. The situation was obvious enough; the Morgan girl was one of these shy people who like to get away and play games under the protection of an assumed identity. So be it, and more power to her. Anyway, Tennyson had to hurry to get a late train back to London.

Next day, he worked all morning at his romantic comedy. Now that the group had agreed to perform the play, Tennyson was scared to death; it was simply not good enough. At half past one, he went out to his local for a pint and some food, picking up a newspaper on the way. He took a Ploughman to his favorite corner table and began enjoying the tangy cheddar cheese, pickled onion, and crusty bread and butter washed down with cool lager.

Then he saw the photograph on page three and the food went sour in his mouth. It looked a lot like the man who was buying drinks for Meredith Morgan last night. But it was the caption under the photograph that shook Tennyson—

BRIGHTON VISITOR STABBED TO DEATH

He read the story and learned the Leeds businessman had been found a few yards from the entrance to a culvert under one of the piers, dead of multiple stab wounds. Robbery was not a motive—he still had his money.

Tennyson stopped reading and stopped eating. He had to make a decision. The obvious thing to do was to go to the police. But there were unanswered questions that impeded him. First, what if the girl was not Meredith? He was ninety-eight percent sure, but that left a devilish two percent.

Worse still, what if it was her, and the man had been bushwhacked after he left her? By setting the police on her, Tennyson would be causing the girl all kinds of trouble for nothing.

For nothing? She might be able to tell the police something that would help them find the killer. That was worth a little inconvenience. Tennyson tossed that problem back and forth in his mind till three o’clock closing, by which time he was three pints further along on the day’s high, but no closer to a solution on Morgan.

So he decided to visit the girl and give her a chance to explain. In German or otherwise. He left the pub and wandered on down past Ely’s display windows, past the station, and on along the Broadway to the entrance to Meredith’s flat. Months ago, after a rehearsal, they had dropped her here from a crowded jolly car and Meredith Morgan, typically, had ducked out with a glum goodnight.

Later that evening, over brandy at his flat, Tennyson had gotten Tony Bastable, the director, to open up about Meredith. Tony was an accountant in real life, a theatrical man only in his spare time. He was one of a type who abound in England, actors with enough talent to be only a shade or two below the Oliviers and Richardsons but who can not make it in a professional system that is grossly overcrowded. So they teach school or balance books and, making it look very easy, put on in church halls productions of a quality to stun visitors from across the Atlantic.

That night he had sat with his thin legs crossed at the ankles, his pink face wreathed in a beatific smile, sipping his brandy and talking of wartime years in India where he and a group of Air Force friends performed Shakespeare for a rajah. Then, prompted by Tennyson, he talked about Meredith Morgan.

She had been a rich girl once. She actually attended Roedean, which explained the plummy accent when she deigned to speak. Then, when she was around eighteen years old, her father managed to pull the set down around her ears.

What Mr. Morgan did was to embezzle money from his stockbroking firm in the city. The reason he stole was to meet gambling debts incurred in a casino in Grosvenor Square. One thing they frown upon in the City of London is embezzling. Not done. So Meredith’s father locked himself in an air-tight room wherein he opened the gas valves without igniting a flame. Worse, he persuaded Meredith’s mother to join him in this one-way ramble to eternity.

It was then that their daughter’s nickname of “Merry” became permanently inappropriate. She stopped attending the prestigious private school, stopped smiling, stopped going out of the house, even stopped eating for quite a while.

It was tough going for a couple of years and, in the end, all Meredith Morgan could afford to offer the world was the cold, quiet robot so thoughtfully tolerated by the Hartfield Dramatic Society.

“Why does she go on with the acting then?” Tennyson asked.

“I suppose because she was a member before the fall,” Tony said. “And today, it’s her one avenue to the world.”

Now, standing on the Broadway outside her door with the big red busses grumbling by and people queuing at the fruit stall in the lane, Tennyson wondered whether to ring Meredith’s bell. Go ahead, he told himself. She’s at work, she won’t answer.

He stepped into the entrance and pressed the button. There was a click from above and the door fell ajar. Tennyson shrugged away a chilly, instinctive warning and went inside. A crumbling flight of steps led upward into a thick smell of animals and soup and rising damp. He trudged upwards, hearing a door creak open above him.

Meredith met him on the landing dressed in threadbare slacks and a sweater coated with cat hairs. A pair of ripe quilted slippers bloomed on her bare feet. “Oh, hello. Have I missed a rehearsal?”

“No. I was just walking by. There’s something I have to ask you about—to settle my mind.”

She drew the door almost shut behind her and stood small, the way she did onstage, with those thin arms hanging lifeless behind her back. She was not going to ask him in.

“Can we go inside?” Tennyson asked. “Just for a minute, I can’t stay.”

She led him in then. Tennyson was not able to look but he received an impression of twisted bedclothes, newspapers and magazines on the floor, used cotton swabs on a dresser, a mottled grey washbasin, and a pot full of something brown on top of a cooker. From the midst of all this, a heavy-eyed cat watched him with contempt.

Meredith said distantly, “I’m not well today. I couldn’t go to work.”

Not knowing where to begin, Tennyson said, “Where do you work?”

“The Education Authority, typing and filing. It’s worth it being a civil servant; they can’t sack you.” Her tone of voice, the surroundings, cried out with self-pity.

Now, beyond her in a corner beside the bed, Tennyson saw the suitcase. Its shape and color, even the type of handle, identified it positively as the one he had seen in the Brighton vestibule. This made up his mind.

“Ach zo,” he said thickly, “did ve haf a gut time by der zee?”

He saw no change in her but he felt a new current in the room, a slightly higher vibration. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

“Meredith,” he said, “I saw you check into that rooming house in Brighton. I heard you using a German accent, quite a good one. And I saw you pick up that man in the pub.”

“What has any of that got to do with you?” It was her first speech with any fiber in it.

“Just that I saw his picture in the paper today. Somebody murdered him, Meredith. And since I know about it, and you haven’t denied you were with him, I’m going to have to decide what to do with what I know.”

She walked past him into the kitchen area and Tennyson had a terrible feeling she was going to offer him a cup of something. Even the thought of the utensils in this place... But she turned and said, “You’ll go to the police.”

“I don’t want to. I don’t want to make trouble for you. But that was very suspicious behavior.”

“I know.” She backed against the counter and turned her face in profile, and he wondered how this sad wraith had converted herself into yesterday’s provocative tourist. “You know how shy I am, I can’t help it. The only way I can let go is to become somebody else. That’s what you saw in Brighton.”

“But the murdered man. I’m right, he was your companion, wasn’t he?” Her silence was enough. “So what happened? You did kill him, didn’t you? I can tell.”

Meredith’s face crumpled and she wept like a child. Bits of explanation came through. “It was never like that before. He was cruel. He didn’t want to make love, he wanted to hurt me. I had no choice. I had to defend myself.”

“But he was stabbed. Do you carry a knife?”

“It was his knife. He was forcing me, on the beach by that terrible sewer. I pretended to cooperate and when he wasn’t alert I grabbed the knife.”

It could have been true and it could just as well not have been. But for a moment or two, Tennyson was touched by something in the girl’s fierce loneliness. He remembered Tony Bastable’s outline of her tragic background and saw her now as the bereaved teenager whose parents had taken the easy way out. He was not about to add to her misery.

“All right,” he said, “all right, don’t cry. I’m not going to the police.” He found himself putting an arm around her shoulder and felt her stiffen and move away. “It’s all over and done with anyway. We can’t bring him back.”

So Eric Tennyson took his secret away with him and carried it through an exciting summer, during which rehearsals for his play got under way. But his imagination would not let go of the material, and he found himself working it into an outline for a drama that the society might want to stage at a later date. In the play, a shy girl from an amateur theatrical group makes regular trips to seaside resorts, assumes another character, picks up interested men, and then stabs them to death.

It was during the final week of rehearsals for his romantic comedy that Tennyson stumbled on an example of life imitating art that shook him to the ground. He was sitting alone in the dressing-room backstage at Marlborough Hall, waiting for a lighting adjustment to be made. Bored, he picked up a copy of an old newspaper left there months ago by a member of some other company using the hall. The headline on page two caught his eye.

BRIGHTON STABBING FITS PATTERN

He read on and learned that the police had linked the murder of the Leeds businessman with two others committed within the year at other resorts along the coast—Bournemouth and Ramsgate. They were working on the theory that someone connected with yachting or coastal fishing was involved.

Tennyson tore the page from the musty tabloid, folded it small, and tucked it into a pocket. He was dizzy with apprehension and guilt. He should have gone to the police right away. How would he justify himself if he called them now, months after the fact? Still, she had not been active again—if, in fact, the other cases had to do with her at all. She had admitted the first killing, in self-defense, she said. The police might be wrong in linking all three.

Tennyson was looking glumly at the floor when Tony Bastable put his ruby face through the doorway. “Come along, author. You’re wanted onstage.” Eric had given himself a small part in his own play, to share the praise or the blame, whichever it might be.

He followed the director up the narrow steps and was able to lose himself in the make-believe action, to put off the troublesome responsibility, at least until he could talk to Meredith Morgan again.

But she was elusive during play week, vanishing after each performance, so he decided to show her the clipping at the cast party on the Saturday following closing night. It was a triumphant week for Tennyson because the audiences loved the play. A woman with West End connections asked him for a copy of the script and said she was sending it to a chap who was always looking for comedies. Tony Bastable was ebullient and asked Tennyson what else he could give them. Eric said he had something on the fire, a thriller, and promised to show Tony an outline.

By party night, the euphoria had faded enough for Tennyson to be concerned again about the secret he was carrying. He waited for Meredith to show and when midnight arrived without her, he asked around. One of the cattier girls rolled her eyes at a friend and said, “She must have gone off on one of her trips”

“Trips?”

“Yes, didn’t you know? Meredith is a loner. She saves her money and then sneaks off someplace were she can get drunk and let her hair down.”

Tennyson did know. And his knowledge went further than theirs. If Meredith Morgan was about to do her thing again, he, Eric Tennyson, would be morally if not legally guilty of aiding and abetting.

He left the party and walked to Meredith’s rooming house. The idea of calling the police still did not appeal to him. He was terribly late with his information and the story would be hard to follow. His best bet would be to follow the girl and head her off.