The Man Who Killed Himself (12 page)

Second Conversation with Coverdale

He was sitting in the garden after lunch drinking hot tea with lemon when Susan announced the Inspector. Arthur said truthfully that he had been wondering what progress was being made.

‘That’s why I’m here. But there’s something I must say first. I’m sorry if we gave you a hard time the other night.’

‘A hard time?’

‘That’s right. I’ll admit I was a bit worried about you though my sergeant, Amies, said I had no need to be. He’s got a head on his shoulders, Amies. But there’s no rough stuff in this force. Police are the servants of the public, is what I say.’ Coverdale’s face was as shiny as his suit. ‘I don’t mind saying we checked on your story about going up to Birmingham. I mention it in case you’re talking to Mr Gibson. Hope it doesn’t cause you inconvenience. And we checked on the train times too. There was a train at twelve-thirty you could have caught.’

‘Is that so? But I didn’t.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t, you
could
have caught it is all I’m saying. I’ll be frank with you, when a married woman is killed my first thought is about her husband, especially if he gets the money. And when his business is a bit shaky –’ He paused.

‘Yes, it’s true mine is. I’m thinking of selling it.’

Coverdale nodded. He had obviously talked to Elsom. ‘I’m being quite frank. You didn’t have an alibi, you could have been on a train which got you down to London in time to get to Fraycut. You were an obvious suspect but for one thing.’

Arthur sipped his tea and put down the glass on the bamboo table by his side. Coverdale did not seem to know quite how he should go on. As he said afterwards to Amies, he felt sorry for the little devil, he looked so trusting even if he was a bit silly. When he broke the news as tactfully as he could, by saying that Mrs Brownjohn had been left at home a good deal and that it was not unusual for women in such a situation to look for other masculine company, the little man was incredulous.

‘I can’t believe it. Not Clare. Why didn’t she say something to me, I’d have done something, tried to come home more.’

She wanted a bit more than you could give her, Coverdale thought, and then reproached himself for coarseness. He produced photostats of the letters they had found, and watched the bewilderment with which Brownjohn read them.

‘You found these
here
?’ Coverdale told him where they had found them. Brownjohn sat shuffling the photostats, reading bits of them. ‘She didn’t leave me. You see what it says in this one, she wouldn’t leave me.’ He continued reading, rubbing his bald head. ‘I suppose it’s true. I never did make her happy.’

Coverdale, who had been married since he was a copper on the beat, had two teenage daughters, and liked to think that he had always been master in his own home, felt sorry for him. ‘You’re right about that, she wouldn’t leave you. That seems to have been at the back of it. Ever heard of a man named Easonby Mellon?’

Brownjohn shook his head. ‘Was that the man? I don’t know the name.’

‘He wasn’t a friend of the family? Your wife’s family?’ Brownjohn said he thought not. Coverdale told him about the hotel at Weybridge. It was the only meeting they had been able to trace, but it was obvious from the letters that the lovers had met elsewhere. ‘This meeting must have been some sort of crisis. She was due at her art class, but she didn’t go to it, left a message saying she had another engagement.’

At Waterloo Station
, Arthur thought. Aloud he said: ‘What was he like? Is he like?’

‘Pretty shifty customer. He ran some sort of shady matrimonial agency. But he’s disappeared. And there’s no doubt this was a premeditated thing. He took care to cover his tracks.’ He described the gutting of the house at Clapham.

‘What did he look like? Did he look like me?’

It was a bit pathetic. From what Coverdale had gathered, Mellon couldn’t have been more unlike Brownjohn. ‘Brown hair and little beard, loud clothes. Aggressive type, from what I can gather.’

‘He was married.’ At Coverdale’s look of surprise Brownjohn explained. ‘He mentions someone called Joan.’

‘Yes, he was married.’ The Inspector remembered the ludicrous story told him by Mellon’s slatternly wife in the furnished bed-sitter where she was living, the tale about her husband working for some cloak and dagger organisation. She had seemed very upset by the news that he had been carrying on with another woman. It had occurred to Coverdale that the tale about being in some sort of Government service might be true, all sorts of unreliable people were employed nowadays, though he had been unable to get any confirmation of it. But the odds were heavily on Mellon being some sort of crook, and the ‘Flexner’ who had called on him being a fellow crook who had been looking for him. The likelihood of this was emphasised by the fact that a number of fingerprints had been found in Mellon’s office which, when checked with the photomicrograph, revealed themselves as obvious forgeries, lacking the sweat pores of genuine prints. The obvious conclusion was that Mellon’s prints were on file, and he had taken the wife along for a session with the Rogues’ Gallery pictures, although he had known in advance that the session would be abortive. Indeed, she had told him as much, and the truth was she seemed quite besotted with the man. ‘If he is there I shan’t tell you,’ she said, but he had been watching her, and he did not think she saw a face she recognised. The problem was to find Mellon.

‘Was she upset?’

‘Who? Oh, the wife. Yes, she was.’ She did seem to have had a presentiment about his not coming back to her on that night when, for some unexplained reason Mellon had walked out on her and set fire to their flat.
I knew he was going for good,
she had said.
I knew my life was finished, finished.
The things people said! ‘She seemed very upset.’

Brownjohn had put down his unfinished glass of lemon tea and was standing up, looking over his neat garden. ‘You think he did it?’

‘He was seen leaving the house at the time, sir. By your neighbour, Mr Lillicrapp. That and the fact that he’s disappeared –’

‘Is there any news of him?’

‘We shall find him,’ Coverdale said, with a confidence he felt. ‘When we really spread the net, sir, the fish don’t wriggle out of it.’

Brownjohn turned to him. His voice was high. ‘Thank you for telling me.’

Coverdale felt more uncomfortable than ever. ‘I left it a day or two until you were feeling better. You had to know some time.’

‘Quite right. You’ve broken it to me as gently as possible.’ Hesitantly, like a schoolboy asking whether he might be allowed to leave the room, he said, ‘Do you want me any more?’

‘Want you?’

‘This has been a shock. If I had that man here I might – I don’t know. Why did he do it?’

‘Looks like jealousy, sir. It’s in the letters. If you’d like me to leave them –’ But Brownjohn was thrusting back the photostats at him with a shaky hand.

‘I don’t want to read them, how could you think I should want to read them again.’ He checked himself. ‘I’m sorry. What I wanted to say was that I think I shall have to leave here.’

Stolidly but with sympathy the Inspector said, ‘I understand.’

‘It all belonged to Clare and not to me. Everything reminds me of her.’ He waved a hand that embraced the garden with its rockery and the foursquare bulk of the red-brick house.

Coverdale said again that he understood. He went away and left Brownjohn in the garden staring at the house in the sunlight, with the half-finished glass of lemon tea beside him on the bamboo table. He may be a silly little man, the Inspector thought, but I shouldn’t like to be in Mellon’s shoes if this chap ever caught up with him.

A Car and a House

He had told Coverdale nothing but the truth. As he sat in the house every evening, eating a meal which he bought from the deep freeze at the grocer, and switching the television set on and off in the hope of finding a programme to interest him, he felt Clare’s presence pervading the rooms as tangibly as a scent. He was not burdened by guilt about the act, which seemed something remote and belonging to another person, nor did he feel any sense of triumph that things had gone as he intended. It was rather as if Clare was not dead at all but might walk through the front door at any moment, criticise the changes he had made in the house and demand that everything be put back in its proper place. He had moved the television set to a part of the room where it was possible to sit and watch in comfort, but he knew that she would be annoyed because it made all the furniture look unbalanced. He hung up some curtains that Clare had discarded because she thought them too bright, but they gave him little pleasure. There were some things that he enjoyed doing himself, like paying the milkman, and there was the daily pleasure of shopping, but even about such things there was something disconcerting, because he was constantly reminded that he was shopping not for two but for one. After buying a chop one day he remembered that Clare did not like chops, and felt irritation because she would not be there to see his gesture of independence. He was irritated also by Susan’s complaisance, which had pleased him so much at first. Why was she so unctuously friendly, why could she not behave more as she had done when Clare was alive? He contemplated getting rid of her, but found himself unable to make the effort.

He spent the whole of one evening up in the attic, dismantling the slot racing track with the intention of bringing it down and setting it up in the dining-room, which he hardly ever used. After all, he could do what he liked, he could even knock two rooms into one to accommodate the track if he wished. But he found that he no longer had any interest in slot racing, and never put up the track again. He advertised and sold the whole thing through a local paper.

He found himself unwilling to leave the house for any length of time. He was not afraid that something might be discovered in his absence, for there was nothing to discover, but each time he opened the front door he had a feeling that something terrible might have happened. This sensation became so strong that he was increasingly reluctant to go out in the evening. There was no lack of invitations, from the Paynes, the Elsoms and others, but he refused them with transparently untruthful excuses. Nor did he go up to London. Easonby Mellon’s clothes were in the Left Luggage office still, together with the diary, and he knew that he must do something about them, but he stayed at The Laurels.

One evening Payne came round, bringing with him some papers for signature. He accepted a glass of sherry.

‘Nice bright curtains. You’ve made some improvements.’ He peered at Arthur as if he were an object at the end of a microscope. ‘How are you keeping, old chap? Sorry you haven’t been able to manage an evening for bridge.’

‘I’ve been busy. And you need a couple.’

‘Nonsense,’ Payne said heartily, although it was obviously true. ‘You’re looking a bit peaky.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘Partly the weather, I dare say. It’s a funny old summer all right,’ the bank manager said judicially, although it had been very much like all the summers Arthur could remember. ‘You want to get away. And you’re a lucky fellow, you can do it.’

This was a day or two after Coverdale’s visit, and the words seemed to harden the resolution in Arthur’s mind. ‘I thought of selling the house.’

‘I quite understand. Though of course we shall be sorry to lose you. Where did you think of going?’

Nothing so tangible as a particular place had been in his mind, and it was with surprise that he heard his reply. ‘A little place by the coast. Somewhere near Brighton.’

From the moment of speech he knew that this was what he wanted. It was as though a gate had been opened by the words, and after Payne had gone he brought down from the attic the other watercolours and sat in a chair looking at them. The memories they evoked filled the room. His mother’s sprawling hand had given them titles: ‘Devil’s Dyke in Summer,’ ‘West Blatchington, the Mill,’ ‘Penn’s House and Cottage, Steyning,’ and so on. The longer he looked at them the more attractive they seemed. They were very different from Clare’s pictures, in which great blocks of vivid colour filled the canvas, barely recognisable as tables and chairs. What nonsense Miss Leppard had talked about Clare showing talent – his mother’s watercolours seemed to him ten times more interesting. When his mother painted she had worn always a large floppy hat which kept away the intense sunlight. He had asked her once whether she could see clearly enough, and she had laughed and said coquettishly, ‘Even a lady painter has to look after her complexion, darling.’ It was true that she had a complexion of beautiful pallor with just the faintest hint of colour in it – or had the colour, now that he came to think of it, been added by art?

They had lived at Brighton for only twelve months, after she separated from his father, but in retrospect the time seemed to have been much longer. In his recollection that had not been a funny old summer, but one in which day after day had been hot with a sky of endless blue. He did not know until years later that his father had gone off to live with the other woman whom he eventually married, only that there were no more quarrels every evening, and that he must not mention his father’s name. ‘You’re all I have now,’ his mother said to him. ‘We shall never be parted, shall we, darling?’ Every day they had taken a picnic somewhere on the downs and there, on a green breast of hill, she sat and dabbed paint on to cartridge paper while he read historical tales and funny stories, or rolled on the grass.

He remembered vividly being at the top of a hill, calling to her to watch and then rolling down, over and over until he came to rest at the bottom. He saw that blood was running down one of his knees and began to cry. He looked up then to the top of the hill, an immense distance, and saw her against the skyline, arms spread out like a bird’s wings, and then descending to him with little musical cries of alarm. They went almost always to the downs, because his mother said that Brighton itself was vulgar. Sometimes they caught a bus and had tea at Steyning in a little low-ceilinged cottage where he always drank milk with soda water, which she said was good for him. Was it possible that this period in his life had lasted for only a few months? He had never returned to that part of Sussex, but looking at the watercolours with their patches of green, gold and blue, he knew that this was where he wished to live.

Later that evening he contemplated his own naked figure in the full-length bedroom mirror, the spindly legs and sloping shoulders, the beginnings of a paunch, and below the paunch the thin fuzz and the small useless-looking penis. He examined closely the egg head with its small sorrowful eyes like raisins, and the poached egg pouches beneath them. ‘Not much of a body,’ he said aloud, and it occurred to him that it was the same body with which Easonby Mellon had been so successful. That too seemed a long time ago, everything before the act was a long time ago.

For a few days after the act he had felt an intense urge to recommence writing his diary, and suffered the sense of deprivation that a smoker feels on giving up cigarettes. He actually bought a notebook and sat down to write in it, but the words refused to flow as they had done in the past. After a couple of days in which he found almost nothing to say, he tore out the sheets on which he had written and burned them. This gesture seemed to have a symbolic value. After it he was better able to accept that he had entered a world in which the pressures and pleasures of the past no longer existed. He did not want the things that Easonby Mellon had taken so greedily, nor was he the Arthur Brownjohn who had been married to Clare. The act had in some mysterious way set him free to begin a new life. He felt himself able to go to London.

He went to the Lektreks’ office in Romany House and found there a few orders and several sharp letters from his American suppliers asking why they had not heard from him. In a burst of energy he typed twenty letters in a day, informing suppliers and customers that because of family troubles Lektreks was closing down. Then he invited Elsom to lunch and told him the news.

‘But you can’t do that.’ Elsom was amazed and indignant.

‘Why not?’

‘I told you, GBD are interested. You’re throwing away money.’

Although the problems of the past were remote he recognised that they existed, and that it would be foolish to let GBD see the Lektreks books. He said curtly that the closing down of Lektreks was his affair.

‘Of course it is.’ Elsom spat out bits of food in his earnestness. ‘But I’m speaking as a friend, Arthur, you understand. You can’t do anything but lose by this.’

‘It’s what Clare would have wished,’ he said piously, and added with more truth, ‘It’s for my own peace of mind.’ The meal was concluded in gloomy silence.

There remained the question of Easonby Mellon’s relics and the diary. They could not be left indefinitely at Waterloo Station, but he had not faced up to the problem of their disposal. When he had collected them, where were they to be buried or burned? It struck him suddenly that he must buy not only a house but a car. If he possessed a car, the disposition of Mellon’s belongings would be simplicity itself.

No sooner had the idea occurred to him than the purchase of a car seemed a matter of urgency. He had learned to drive in the army during the war, but he took a few lessons and surprised his instructor by his aptitude and the quickness of his reactions. There was little point in having a car until he had passed the driving test, but he was unable to deny himself the pleasure of spending money. He did not buy a new car because part of the pleasure lay in bargaining about the price, and after visiting half a dozen dealers and trying out twice that number of cars he bought a two-year-old Triumph, guaranteed by the dealer to have had only one owner and to be in splendid condition. The car was driven back to The Laurels and put into the garage, which had been cleared to receive it. He waited eagerly for the day when he would take the test.

In the meantime he was engaged in selling The Laurels and buying a house on the Sussex downs. He slightly scandalised Jaggard, the estate agent, who hinted delicately that the recent tragedy might affect the price, by asking what would be a reasonable figure and then naming a sum two hundred and fifty pounds below it. The Laurels was bought by a civil servant who had a wife and family, and the sale was completed in August. Arthur had, however, already moved out. There was a sale of effects, a symbolic severance of the bonds that linked him to Clare. He included all of their household belongings in this sale, even things that would obviously be needed in his new home like kitchen utensils and the lawn mower. He did not attend the sale, but was pleased to see that the picture of Mr Slattery had fetched only three pounds, the cost of the frame.

He said as few goodbyes as possible. What, after all, linked him to Fraycut now that life with Clare was over? The Paynes, the Elsoms, one or two others, said how sorry they were to see him go, but he did not feel that they were in any way his friends. Perhaps it was a good thing that Arthur Brownjohn, starting a new life, should have no friends. He gave Susan a cheque for a hundred pounds, saying that Clare would have wished her to have it, and was embarrassed by a flood of tears. He had a slightly disturbing encounter when he was almost knocked down while crossing a street one day by a car which swung without warning out of a side road.

The driver poked his head out of the window and shouted at him. ‘You want to bloody well look where you’re going.’ It was Doctor Hubble. He got out of the car and stood swaying slightly. ‘Oh, it’s you. How are you? Hear you’re clearing out.’

Arthur agreed, although they were not the words he would have chosen.

‘Don’t blame you. Shouldn’t want to stay myself in the circumstances.’ What did he mean by that? ‘Still haven’t got the chap who did it?’

‘No.’

Hubble stood glaring at him, and Arthur felt a twinge of uneasiness. How could he ever have tried deliberately to deceive a man who resembled more than anything else a dangerous wild animal? Then the doctor stuck out his hand, said ‘She was a damned fine woman,’ got back into the car and drove away.

Before he left he went to see Coverdale. The Inspector’s reception of him was friendly but gloomy. There was no news of Mellon.

‘We’ve found somebody who saw him on the platform. Carrying a blue suitcase.’ A shiver went through Arthur’s frame. This was the suitcase in the Left Luggage office. If the police ever thought of searching there…but why should they do any such thing? Coverdale was still talking. ‘…up in London I guess, hiding out. A crook like Mellon knows plenty of places. But we’ll find him.’

‘You don’t think he’s gone abroad.’

‘I don’t. One thing, far as we can tell he’s got no passport. No, he’s hiding out. Trouble is, we don’t know who his friends are. Can’t find out how he got to know your wife either.’

Arthur shook his head to show that he also could not imagine how this had come about. Then he said with careful slowness, ‘You’ve questioned his own wife again, I suppose?’

Coverdale stared at him. The shiny lumps on his face were more than usually apparent. ‘You hadn’t heard?’

‘Heard what?’

‘She’s dead. Put her head in the gas oven.’

On the wall behind the Inspector there was a photograph of police sports, with a man doing the pole vault, twisting over the bar. Arthur stared at this photograph.

‘Can’t think what made her do it. Wish I had talked to her again, got to the bottom of all that rubbish about Mellon being an agent.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Fortnight ago. It was in the papers. She left the usual note, can’t go on, that kind of thing.’

A secretary came in with letters to be signed. Coverdale said, ‘We’ll keep in touch. Don’t worry. The usual channels work slowly sometimes, but everything comes through them in the end.’