Choice of Evils (17 page)

The sound made Andrew shiver slightly, but her face was solemn and anxious.

‘Forget I said that,’ she said in a gentler voice than he had heard from her yet. ‘Of course Peter had nothing to
do with it. What I'm actually inclined to believe is that the murderer doesn't belong to these parts at all. I think he may have followed Rachel down from London and had set off home again before her body had ever been discovered.’

‘First stealing the manuscripts and pushing Magda Braile over the edge of the cliff?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Why should he steal the manuscripts?’

‘We don't know that he did. I'm inclined to believe that Rachel took them herself and hid them somewhere. That could have been quite a while before her murder. I dare say she could have got into the summerhouse some time before it and taken them and made a parcel of them and perhaps deposited it in a bank or somewhere like that.’

Andrew nodded. He remembered what Peter had told him of seeing Rachel come out of the summerhouse in the evening after the performance in the Pegasus Theatre. Peter had not said that she had been carrying anything, but anyway in the darkness he would probably not have been able to see whether or not she was. Then in the afternoon of the next day she had paid a visit to Edward Clarke's office. Might she not have left a parcel in his care? And if she had, had he mentioned that to the police?

‘Well, I've taken up a great deal of your time,’ he said, ‘when all that I came to ask you was what you knew about Mrs Wale. But you've given me some interesting things to think about.’

He stood up. She stood up, facing him, solid and square, yet in some way on the defensive.

‘About Magda Braile …’ she said.

'She saw what she should not,’ Andrew answered. ‘Find Rachel's murderer and you've got Magda's.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ But she did not sound convinced. At that moment they heard the door at the bottom of the staircase open and close, and then footsteps on the
stairs. Then the door of the little sitting-room opened and Simon Amory came in. He seemed not to see Andrew immediately, but went up to Mina Todhunter, put his hands on her shoulders and began to shake her. His eyes were wild.

‘Aren't you afraid of me, Mina,’ he said. ‘You ought to be, I'm a murderer, everyone knows that. So aren't you afraid of what I might do to you?’

She showed no sign of being afraid. She looked up into his face with a melancholy smile, then withdrew from his grasp.

‘In case you hadn't noticed, we have a visitor,’ she said.

Amory swung round to look at Andrew.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, his voice suddenly low and hoarse. 'Scenes should be kept in the family.’

‘Now what makes you say a thing like that?’ Mina asked. ‘You'll give Professor Basnett quite a wrong idea of the situation if you try to make him believe we're brother and sister.’

‘Ah no, I'm only talking of the profound dependence we have on one another,’ Amory said. ‘Nothing as simple as a blood relationship. You see, Professor, I'm a little out of my mind, and Mina's the one person who can stop me going right out of it. The police believe I'm a murderer and I've just been through the worst couple of hours with them that I've ever spent in my life. They've almost made me believe that I could be capable of murder. And Mina's the one person who can convince me I'm not. Isn't that true, Mina? You don't believe I'm a murderer.’

‘Of course you're not, dear,’ she said. ‘Now sit down and calm down and I'll make you some coffee. Professor, you'd like some coffee, wouldn't you?’

But Andrew declined it and since he was quite sure that they would not talk about whatever it was that Amory really wanted to discuss with Mina Todhunter as long as he was there, he took his leave, went downstairs and left
the shop. He then went to the coffee shop round the corner to which he had been with Peter and Rachel Rayne on Saturday morning and had the coffee that he had refused in the flat above the bookshop.

Sitting there, brooding on the talk that he had had with Miss Todhunter and on her explanation of how it had come about that the manuscripts typed by Mrs Wale had been written by Mrs Amory and not by her husband, he wondered how much he believed it and how much Miss Todhunter believed it herself. For a time he felt very con-fused and troubled, then he made up his mind to pay another visit to Edward Clarke, but this time, since it was not a Sunday, not at his home, but at his office. He did not know where the office was and had recourse once more to a telephone directory and having found the address, considered telephoning for an appointment, but then decided to arrive unannounced and take his chance of being able to see the man. Later he would go to the police station and tell Inspector Mayhew what Mina Todhunter had told him about Mrs Wale and the missing manuscripts. And then, he suddenly decided, he would go back to London.

He had not come to Gallmouth to become involved in a murder enquiry and provided that Peter was not in trouble, he did not believe that he had any obligation to remain. To be alone in his flat in St John's Wood, considering, now that all the work that he had had to do on Robert Hooke was definitely concluded, whether to begin another book on another noted seventeenth-century botanist, Malpighi, seemed to him attractive beyond words. He loved his flat and he always felt at home in London. He found it hard to understand now what had ever moved him to think of coming away from it.

Edward Clarke's office was in a Georgian crescent near to the centre of the town. A young woman greeted Andrew in an outer office and said she would enquire
whether Mr Clarke was free. It appeared that he was, for Andrew was kept waiting for only about five minutes, then was shown into a room where Edward Clarke sprang up from behind a desk and came towards him with a hand outstretched and a smile of welcome on his face.

The very man I wanted to see,’ he said, ‘but when I rang your hotel they said you were out and had left no information as to when you were likely to be back. But sit down, sit down, my dear fellow, and tell me what brings you.’

He piloted Andrew to a leather armchair that faced across the desk the chair where he had been sitting when Andrew entered, then he returned to that chair, rested an elbow on the desk and a plump cheek on one of his small, short-fingered hands and said, ‘Fire away, now, fire away.’ Andrew wondered if he repeated everything twice to all his clients, and if he was capable of drafting a legal document without doing so.

‘I've come to ask you a very simple question,’ Andrew said. ‘It concerns the visit that I believe Miss Rayne paid to you on Saturday afternoon.’

‘Ah, that visit - yes, yes, I believe I've told the police absolutely everything that occurred,’ Clarke said, ‘but who knows, perhaps I didn't. You may be able to jog my memory about something. I find my memory becoming more and more treacherous. And the worst of it is, I still trust it. You see, when I was young it used to be almost infallible and so I got into a habit of relying on it. I hardly ever made notes of anything. I just trusted to that jolly old memory of mine. And now it lets me down at every turn and I still don't make notes. A bad habit, a very bad habit, that's what it is. The mistakes I've made because of it! But still, I think I can remember everything that happened on Saturday afternoon.’

‘I don't think you'll have any difficulty remembering what I'm going to ask you about,’ Andrew said. ‘It's only
whether Miss Rayne was carrying a package of any sort when she arrived here, and whether she left it in your charge.’

‘I see, I see,’ Clarke said, frowning as if even that question taxed his memory, and beginning to chew a thumb. Then he shook his head. 'She was carrying something, but she didn't leave it here. Now what was it? Oh, of course, it was just her handbag. A rather large one that was on what I believe is called a shoulder-strap. Would that be what you mean? But I can say quite definitely that she didn't leave it behind when she left.’

‘Then I don't think it can be what I'm looking for,’ Andrew said. ‘And I don't think a handbag, however large, would be big enough to contain the things that have got lost.’

‘Ah, you mean the missing manuscripts!’ Clarke exclaimed. 'The police told me about them. They seemed to think that they may in some way provide a motive for her murder, that she was murdered to obtain possession of them. I can't see it myself. They can't have been valuable. But you think she had them in her possession, do you, but that she deposited them somewhere? Well, if she did, it must have been before she came to see me. But it's an interesting idea, very interesting. Of course, if she'd done anything like leaving them with me, I'd have told the police about it and handed the package over. I'm sorry if that's upsetting a theory of yours, but I really can't help you.’

‘Well, perhaps since I'm here now, you can tell me why you tried to telephone me at the hotel this morning,’ Andrew said.

‘Ah, yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. That was because of a little theory of mine,’ Clarke said. ‘And first, can you tell me why our Simon invited your nephew down here to stay with him. I've gathered that they don't know each other well.’

‘They'd met once when Peter was invited down here/ Andrew said.

‘That was my impression. And of course that wouldn't be at all surprising if Simon was an impulsive sort of person, or just a sociable sort of person. But I think I'm safe in saying that normally he's neither. And as a matter of fact, our committee was rather upset about it. I don't mean that they were upset at finding that Peter Dilly was coming. Indeed not. They were delighted. But they were upset that the invitation had been given without their having been consulted. Very touchy, some of them are. But of course, they weren't going to upset the arrangement, and an official invitation went off quite promptly. After all, Simon
is
Simon Amory. And once they'd settled down to the idea, they recognized that Dilly was a great acquisition. Then we heard, when the question of booking accommodation for him came up, that he was going to be staying with Simon, so naturally we assumed they were good friends, knew each other well, and so on. And it was Dilly himself who happened to tell me that that wasn't so, that they'd just met once at some literary luncheon. To tell you the truth, I think he was distinctly puzzled himself at Simon's invitation. He seemed to feel that Simon actually disliked him.’

‘Yes, that's what he told me,’ Andrew said. ‘But I'm inclined to think that that's an impression Amory may have a habit of giving people.’

‘Yes indeed, yes indeed. I'm afraid it made him rather unpopular on our committee. And if he hadn't taken a sudden and warm liking to your nephew, why did he invite him down, particularly without having obtained the agreement of the committee? Why did he do that?’

‘I haven't thought much about it,’ Andrew said. ‘Not knowing him at all well myself, I assumed it was just the kind of thing he was liable to do. He invited me to dinner without even having met me.’

Edward Clarke shook his head.

‘Of course, I may be quite wrong about him, but I should say it was very unusual. And my little theory about it is simply that he invited your nephew in the hope that he would take his sister-in-law off his hands. I knew from Simon that she'd invited herself to his house for the period of the festival and I'd realized that he was quite put out about it. I didn't know why. I don't know now. But it strikes me now that it may have been to be able to hand her over to someone else that he had the sudden idea of inviting Dilly. After all, he and Rachel were much of an age, and he would have recognized that Dilly was good company. He could easily leave them to one another while he as usual went ahead with his work.’

‘But do you think he did that?’

‘Did what?’

‘Get ahead with his work? It's only just occurred to me, but we've all been talking of three manuscripts having gone missing, but if he was going ahead with his work, there'd have been at least portions of a fourth manuscript somewhere in that summerhouse, wouldn't there? And if that - some unfinished portion of a new book he was writing - had been stolen along with the others, wouldn't he have been making a bit of noise about it? To have work you've spent weeks, or even months on, snatched away, must be quite the most upsetting thing that can happen to a writer.’

‘That's true. Of course it's true, though I hadn't thought of it.’

‘But perhaps he hadn't got as far as actually writing his fourth book. When he went to the summerhouse to work, perhaps he was still only thinking it out, plotting and planning, and making notes about it, which he may have taken away with him. Or perhaps…’

Andrew paused, very nearly telling Edward Clarke his suspicion that Amory had never written any of the books
published under his name and so no fourth work had ever had any existence, but his talk with Mina Todhunter had left him feeling confused about the matter, far less convinced than he had been before it that Amory was a fraud.

Instead, he went on, ‘You seem to think it's important that Amory should have invited Peter here without particularly liking him, just to help keep Miss Rayne off his hands. Why is that?’

‘Why is it important?’ Clarke said. ‘Well, perhaps it isn't. It just occurred to me …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, don't you think that the more we know about the relationships of the people concerned, the sooner we shall arrive at the truth?’

‘Oh, certainly.’

‘And Simon's relationship with your nephew has been a bit puzzling. But my idea makes it perfectly easy to understand.’

‘And leaves Peter in the clear.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Well, that being so, I'm very grateful to you for having thought of it.’

‘You're fond of your nephew, aren't you?’

‘Very.’

‘It's a nice thing to see. I've a nephew whom I haven't seen for over a year, and when he does come to see us, I'm quite afraid of leaving Tricia, my daughter, as you may remember, alone with him. His behaviour isn't, well, isn't exactly cousinly, and she's such a child, she doesn't have any fear of him. But that's just my suspicious mind at work. Parental jealousy, perhaps. I can't help feeling suspicious of Simon, though I haven't thought of any really sufficient reason for his murdering those two poor women. If his marriage was bigamous, as you suggested yesterday, I realize Rachel could have been blackmailing him. That's what her visit here may have been about, an
attempt, perhaps, to raise her rates. All the same, to shoot her in his own summerhouse, wasn't that a bit foolish? Couldn't he have found a cleverer way of doing it? And with his supposed wife dead for so long now, would the police have taken any action about it? I doubt it rather.’ ‘I agree,’ Andrew said. ‘I don't really believe the bigamy in itself had much to do with it all. But now I really mustn't take up any more of your time. I only came to ask you that simple question.’