The Cherry Blossom Corpse (10 page)

“Some one called Robert Lefebre—address in Lyons, France. One called Robert Achinowuba, address in Lagos—”

“That'd be the one with the robes.”

“Then there's a Robert Macintosh, from St. Andrews, a Robin Grant—should we count a Robin?—”

“Oh, sure.”

“—from Ontario, and a Robert Christopherson from Iowa. That's it. I suppose the Canadian, the American and the Scot are the most likely.”

I shrugged.

“Most likely, yes. But we can't rule out any of them. The point is, we know nothing or next to nothing about Amanda's past. So anything is possible.”

“ ‘Next to nothing?' So something you do know?”

“Only what I gleaned from
Happy Tears
—a history of the romantic love story, written by one Arthur Biggs, who is here in the guest-house, so you will certainly meet him. He has a short biographical dictionary of writers
in the back, from which I gleaned that she was a West Country girl, became an actress, had a less than dazzling career, and took to writing candy-floss romances. More than that I know not. Except that, at the moment, she is extremely successful—or
was,
up to an hour or two ago. Which brings up the question of who is to inherit . . . You could get on to the Yard about that, or I can . . . Now, is there anything we haven't—”

But even as I spoke, I was surprised to hear soft footsteps from outside, on the landing.
Soft
footsteps. The policemen Stein had with him were mostly lean, some to the point of gauntness, but they were tall and capable-looking. They would not be soft on their feet, if they were walking naturally, and why should they go softly? The guests were all supposed to be waiting downstairs in the lounge, or giving their accounts of the evening to the policemen in the bar or in the dining-room. Who, then, was outside on the landing? The proprietress?

I walked quickly but silently to the door, and opened it. At the other end of the corridor, about to put his key in his bedroom door, was Arthur Biggs. He started guiltily. I did not put too much weight on that start. People who suddenly find themselves involved in a murder case are always starting guiltily, even if they've been caught doing nothing worse than pouring themselves a cup of coffee.

“Mr. Biggs?” I said, my voice raised. The hand with the key in it fell back to his side. “I thought it was agreed that all the guests should stay downstairs in the lounge?”

“Well, yes,” he said, his voice taking on a touch of the querulous, now he was no longer in command. “But I didn't realize we were supposed to regard it as an
order.”

I walked down the corridor and stood by him. A natural and unpleasant confidence was fighting in his expression and in the set of his shoulders to get the better of a nasty bout of nerves.

“How did you get here? There was a policeman on duty at the bottom of the stairs.”

Arthur Biggs turned and pointed to an opening labelled E
MERGENCY STAIRS
and N
øDUTGANG
, coming out almost opposite his room—a poky, dark, uninviting well of stairs.

“They come out just outside the kitchens. I always investigate these things, in case of fire—terrible risk, in an old wooden building like this. The policeman in the lounge was occupied in getting something for Lorelei Zuckerman, so I slipped out and came up.”

“Then clearly you
did
realize it was an order that you stayed in the lounge.” I looked at him sternly, and he dropped his eyes. “What did you want to get from your room?”

Now he seemed to regain confidence. Perhaps his mission was entirely innocent.

“I wanted my notepad. It's obvious we're in for a long session tonight. I thought I'd use the time mapping out a good-sized piece on Amanda as romance writer—maybe for the
Sunday Express.”

“I see. And maybe a little human interest piece on how you found yourself caught up in her murder?”

He looked cunning, as if I'd tried to catch him out.

“The word ‘murder' hasn't been mentioned yet. Not to us ordinary mortals. Among ourselves, of course . . . But, yes, I
did
think that, if it
did
turn out to be murder, the
Daily Grub
might be interested in a personal account—”

“You want to get in first?”

He spread out his hands in an Anglo-Gallic gesture.

“What's wrong with that? And an on-the-spot account does have a special thrill for readers.”

“And you think that Amanda is—was—of sufficient interest to the general public for the
Grub
people to make you a whopping offer?”

“Yes, I do. And if she hadn't been before, she would be now. A dead writer is always a best-selling one. Have you ever seen a news hoarding reading FAIRLY-WELL-SELLING NOVELIST DIES? But actually Amanda
was
of interest to the general public in any case.”

“I'd never heard of her before I came here.”

“That, if you'll pardon my saying so, is neither here nor there. You grew up in a somewhat rarefied literary atmosphere. I am talking about the general public. Amanda appeared on things like
TV-am
and
The Wogan Show.
For years she was one of the panellists on
The Petticoat Line.”
He saw me shudder, and said nastily: “Oh, I realize you're a Radio Three man, and probably only watch the news and
Mastermind
on the box. But I assure you the general public not only read her in enormous numbers, they knew her as a personality as well. She did a lot of ‘personal appearance' things as well—opening supermarkets, housing projects, bazaars. She was kept very busy.”

“So it seems,” I said, watching him. “Quite apart from the writing.”

“Yes,” said Arthur Biggs. “Quite apart from the writing.”

“If she did, in fact, write the books that appeared over her name,” I continued.

“Quite,” said Arthur Biggs.

I
TOOK THE KEY FROM HIS HAND
, unlocked his door, and went into his bedroom. There was a blank exercise book on his desk, and I took it up and waved it at him.

“This do?”

He nodded, rather stiff and on his dignity.

“We shall be going over this room later anyway,” I pointed out to him. “We have to be sure that no one else has gone over it first.” I led the way out on to the landing, and locked the door behind me. After a second's thought I returned to him the key. “You'd better come along to Amanda's room,” I said, and he trotted after me with a new access of confidence, or self-importance. It didn't take much, I mused, either to deflate or reflate him.

“I think you'd better hear this,” I said to Stein and Svein, leading Briggs into Amanda's sanctum. They sat down on the bed, looking mystified.

“Of course, I don't
know,”
Arthur Briggs began, nervously, his hands gesturing spasmodically as he suddenly found himself at the centre of attention. “It's just as much a guess on my part as it is on yours.”

“My guess was made on the basis of your book,” I pointed out.

“Yes, I realize that. I saw you had a copy on the bus today.”

He said it as if I had earned myself a good mark.

“As soon as I sat down and thought about it, you'd made it pretty clear there,” I said. “Why did you do that—as a sort of joke?”

I looked at him. Lorinda Mason, as he was known to his limited circle of readers, didn't look the sort to make jokes. He was below middle height, physically unimpressive, with a sandy moustache that was more apologetic than assertive, and weak, bottle-blue eyes. He looked like a bank clerk who would never make it to manager. But there was about the man this ineffable air of self-importance, and when I suggested a joke he seemed to wiggle, metaphorically, in his nether regions.

“Something of the kind,” he agreed. “Of course, people are always making jokes about romance writers, and the whopping errors they make—”

“Not you, I'm sure,” I said cunningly, and watched his face to see the ever-present self-esteem turn up the edges of his mouth. On cue it came.

“One does have a
cer
tain pride in one's work,” he murmured. “But one gets all too used to other writers who simply won't take the trouble. There are plenty of errors of that sort in Amanda's books. But what made me sit up was the one that you obviously noticed.”

“That someone born in Tiverton should imagine Exeter was in Somerset,” I said.

“Quite. A Devonian knows his own county town. Though if you look at the text closely it wasn't
quite
as definite as that. One could
just
take it that they were looking
from
the tower out to the Somerset hills in the distance.”

“Can one?” I asked.

“I've no idea. But anyway, I can't see a Devon girl writing that, can you? She would make it quite unambiguous. That was an early book I quoted from: I suspect the publishers—and Amanda herself, probably—have got a lot more careful in recent ones. In the early days there were five or six Amanda Fairchild titles a year. Now there are only two. I imagine she always reads them, because nowadays she has to do an awful lot of chatting to fans, and suchlike, and she'd have to know what she is supposed to have written. When the early ones came out they must have been too busy establishing her public persona and managing the publicity machine to take the elementary precaution of having her read all the stuff that appeared under her name.”

“Was that,” asked Stein, “the point of it all?”

“I would imagine so,” I said. “Do you know anything more?” I asked, turning to Arthur Biggs.

“Know?
Certainly not. But one might
guess.
Her publishers are the Tamworth group. Enormous group, enormous list, rather soulless. It's a perfectly good list, but they've never had any personalities on it, not in the romance field. They've had nobody who could rival, say, Cartland in putting herself over to the public. Until Amanda, that is. In fact, a lot of their romance writers have always been men, and we do suffer from a disability in this field.” He made a self-deprecatory gesture, but somehow it managed to imply that, were he otherwise
sexed, he would be an absolute wow on the chat shows. “And even with the women—well, as you will have noticed since you've been here, as often as not romance writers are perfectly mousy little creatures, with not an atom of self-projection.”

“Just doing it for the money?” asked Svein.

“Yes. Because if you can strike the right note, the money is certainly there, the market never fails. But some of them of course, are also acting out their romantic fantasies. Like your sister,” he said as an afterthought, nodding to me. I suspect that pinprick was his mean little revenge.

“I don't know where that leaves you,” I said.

“Oh—in it for the money, purely for the £.s.d. I came from crime—there's no money there at all. Anyway, granted that Tamworth had an absolute preponderance of the male and mousy, it must have occurred to someone that if they wanted to get some figure on their list to rival the Sugar-Plum Queen, they'd better hire one. And hire an actress rather than a writer—one who would put on a marvellous
show.”

“And the collected works would be written by the males and the mousies. But what would they have to say about
that?”

“Why should they mind? If you are a born mouse, all this publicity stuff is sheer torment anyway. And if their books sold twice, three times what they would under their own name, they certainly wouldn't begrudge a percentage going to Amanda, who was up there doing her outrageous bit on the box, or being interviewed by ghastly women for the women's pages of newspapers.”

“Amanda,” I said, “begins to make a lot more sense.”

“In what way?” asked Stein.

“She was very near—mean—with money. I assumed it was the equivalent of John Paul Getty installing pay
telephones, but probably the real reason was that she didn't have that much.”

“She was always interested in contracts,” contributed Arthur Biggs. “It always amused me that she had to hold back on her
real
interest—her percentage.”

“Then there was the problem of how intelligent she really was,” I went on. “It bewildered me—I never could make up my mind. Out of the blue you'd hear evidence of a sharp mind: that letter to the editor about the Sørby woman's article, in fact all her arguments with her. Whether you agreed with her or not, she managed her side very cleverly. She spotted things, she sized up people. But then she'd come out with some appalling piece of marshmallow silliness, and all sorts of dated garbage about the sexes, the sort of crap you wouldn't expect to read in a Victorian novel of any pretensions, It wasn't that she was ever inconsistent in any pin-downable way, but somehow things never entirely cohered.”

“So you think she was
hired
to put on a performance as a romantic writer?” asked Stein. “To
be
what people expected?”

“I think so,” said Arthur Biggs.

“But that it often conflicted with her real character,” I added. “Think of the first night here. There was Lorelei Zuckerman putting on this incredible performance—another performance? or just her uniquely horrible self?—anyway, the general reaction of most of us as dinner was ending was to crawl away and die, right? And la Zuckerman gave the impression that she would be delighted if we did. But it was Amanda who insisted on coming over, greeting her and screwing a few words out of her. It was—and I don't use the word lightly—extremely brave. It also showed an acute understanding of character and occasion. But it did
not
go with the
froth and the silliness and the ‘look at little me' of her general performance.”