Choice of Evils (18 page)

‘If Rachel had had a parcel that she left in my charge. Well, I'm sorry I can't help you there. Nice to have seen you.’

They shook hands and Edward Clarke ushered Andrew out of his office.

He walked slowly back towards the hotel. When he reached the esplanade he paused, then settled down for a rest in one of the shelters along it and gazed dreamily out to sea. It had roughened up since the day before, though there was not much power in the breakers. They reared up their heads, curled over and came crashing down on the shingle, sucking a mass of pebbles out with them as the surf curled back once more into the deeper water. There was a feeling of moisture in the air, as if rain might be coming soon.

Andrew was startled out of his dream by a voice that hissed one word at him from the other end of the shelter.

‘Murder!’

‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

There was only one person there, an elderly woman, but so wrapped up in jackets and scarves that it was impossible to make any accurate guess at her age.

‘Haven't you been reading the papers?’ she asked. Her wizened face turned towards him. Her small, dark eyes peered at him with incredulous brightness. ‘Nothing but murder in them. And when you try the television, there's nothing but murder there. All of a sudden Gallmouth's in
the news, because we've had murders here. You know that, I suppose.’

‘Yes, I've heard a certain amount about it,’ Andrew said.

‘I should hope so! But it isn't just here, it's everywhere. Turn on the news in the evening, and what do you get? Murder! And bombs and civil wars and terrorism and child abuse and starvation. That's what the news is nowadays. And if it isn't that, then it's earthquakes and volcanoes and floods and fires. We're lucky, aren't we, having no earthquakes to speak of, and no volcanoes, and only an occasional hurricane and when they happen they're nothing much to speak of? We have a bit of flooding now and then, but nothing compared with what they have in other places. Oh, we're lucky, having only the few murders a week, and the deaths on the roads, and a bit of corruption in the police, so they say, to put up with. Aren't we lucky?’

Her voice had become more insistent.

‘Yes, I suppose we are,’ Andrew replied. ‘We don't suffer much from natural disasters.’

‘Ah, but we've got the Irish,’ she said. ‘Wouldn't you call them a natural disaster?’

‘Perhaps we should.’

‘Mind you, my mother was Irish, and a sweeter woman you couldn't find.’

‘Which makes the tragedy worse.’

‘That's right. It's all tragedy. The only kind of news people want is tragedy. I was going to a play on Saturday night that I was told was a tragedy, and I won't say I wasn't looking forward to it, but what happened? The leading lady got herself killed off the stage, not just on it like it should have been. That's tragedy for you. And the papers have been full of nothing else since. It wasn't like that when I was young.’

‘Are you sure it wasn't?’

‘Well, if it was, I didn't know anything about it. Now you can't help but know.’

‘I think that's the point. It's all been going on since the beginning of time. Human beings aren't very nice people.’ He stood up. ‘I must be going. I've enjoyed our chat.’

But unfortunately the chat had distracted him and taken his mind off something that he had intended to think about. It was the first few words that Simon Amory had spoken when he had burst into Mina Todhunter's small sitting-room.

‘Aren't you afraid of me, Mina? … Aren't you afraid of what I might do to you?’

At the time when Amory had spoken them, Andrew had assumed that they were ironic, that they were mere mockery of the possibility that he could be a danger to the woman. But suppose that had not been the case. Sup-pose he could really do her harm, and if Andrew had not been there, he would have proceeded to do it. What kind of harm could it have been? Not shooting her, not strangling her, not beating her to death. Yet why not? If he had already accomplished two murders, why should he not have had the thought of adding a third to his list? But if violence of that sort seemed improbable, with what kind of violence was he threatening her? Unless, after all, it was simply irony. Perhaps that was the most likely.

Andrew reached the Dolphin and went up to his room. He had just reached the door of it and had inserted his key in the lock when the door next to it opened and Peter came out.

‘Were you looking for me?’ Andrew asked. 'That's not my room.’

‘No, it's mine,’ Peter said. ‘I've just moved in.’

‘You've left Amory?’

‘Yes, but I've been told it would be a good idea to stay around until the inquest. It'll be adjourned, but still I'll be needed, as the person who found the body.’

‘Did Amory turn you out?’

‘Not in so many words. He had his way, however, of letting me know that I wasn't welcome. So I thought I'd join you here.’

‘I'm not staying. I'm going back to London.’

‘No, Andrew, no, you can't do that!’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I want you to stay, I suppose.’

‘There's really nothing I can do here … I've got to see Mayhew once more, but then I could go.’

‘But you can help keep up my spirits. They need a bit of help. Mayhew seems to think there are only two people who could have killed Rachel, and one of them is me.’

‘And the other is Amory?’

‘Well, obviously.’

‘I'm less and inclined to think he did it. I've just been listening to an interesting theory that he invited you down here to act as a sort of bodyguard for Rachel. Or if it wasn't exactly that, it was a side effect of what he did. Now, let's go and have a drink and some lunch.’

They went down in the lift together. In the bar Andrew tried to explain what he had meant.

‘I've been talking to Clarke,’ he said. ‘I went to him to ask if Rachel had been carrying any sort of package when she went to see him, and if by any chance she left it with him. You see, Todhunter, to whom I'd been talking just beforehand, put it into my head that Rachel herself might have taken those missing manuscripts and left them some-where, and it occurred to me that if that had happened she might have left them with Clarke. But the answer was no, she hadn't and that if she had he'd have handed them over to the police, which of course I'd realized, but it just seemed worth asking, mainly to see if anything else came out while we were talking. And something did, though I'm not sure how important it is.’

‘This thing about my being a bodyguard?’

‘Well, what Clarke actually said was that he thought
Amory had asked you down because Rachel had invited herself, much against his will, and he wanted someone to take her off his hands. And that seems likely enough, but if it's correct, then it doesn't look as if at the time he was considering murdering her, because you were always liable to be around as a witness.’

‘But if he killed her on impulse, that wouldn't have affected the situation, would it?’

‘No, that's true.’

‘All the same, I like the theory. I haven't been able to understand why Amory invited me, once I'd got over the idea that he'd done it for the sake of my charm. And it didn't take me long to do that. What else did Todhunter tell you? Had she any interesting ideas?’

Andrew told Peter as much as he could remember of his discussion with Mina Todhunter. He told him of her explanation of how it had come about that the manu-scripts of Simon Amory's first two books had been in the handwriting of his wife and how it was she who had given them to be typed to Mrs Wale.

‘And did you believe her?’ Peter asked. ‘Or do we stick to the idea that Mrs Amory actually wrote the books?’

‘That's what I'm inclined to do,’ Andrew answered, though with a certain reluctance. If what Mina Todhunter had told him was true, then Simon Amory was a man to be pitied and admired, not suspected of fraud any more than of murder. ‘I'm going to talk to Mayhew after lunch,’ he said. ‘He wanted to know what I could get out of Tod-hunter about Mrs Wale.’

But when, about an hour later, Andrew saw Detective Inspector Mayhew in the police station, and had told him of his talk with Mina Todhunter the inspector appeared to lose his interest in Mrs Wale.

‘I thought we had something there, you know,’ he said. ‘I thought that if she was shown those books that Amory had published after his big success, and if she recognized
them as what she'd typed for Mrs Amory, we'd have proof that it was Mrs Amory who'd written them.’

‘That's what my nephew thought,’ Andrew said.

‘But if there's any truth in the story you've just told me/ Mayhew said, 'that she'd written them to Amory's dictation, Mrs Wale's evidence doesn't amount to much.’

‘Tell me something, all the same,’ Andrew said. 'Sup-pose those books were really written by Mrs Amory, do you believe Amory would go the length of committing murder to prevent the truth about that coming out?’

The inspector cocked his large head on one side and gave a little grin.

‘People commit murder for no reason at all, you know,’ he said. ‘If you feel inclined to do a murder, then you'll do it, motive or not.’

‘And you've no other suspects but Amory, except my unfortunate nephew.’

‘Oh, I wouldn't go so far as to say that. You see, we may have been looking at this affair back to front, so to speak. We've been thinking Miss Braile, that's to say Mrs Nicholl, was killed because she'd recognized the person who'd just killed Rachel Rayne coming away from the spot. But we don't know for sure, do we, that Braile was killed after Rayne? Suppose she was killed before. Suppose it was Rayne who saw the murder of Braile and who was then killed to silence her. You've got to look at a whole lot of different motives, haven't you? The books may not be of the slightest importance.’

‘In fact, you're thinking of Desmond Nicholl,’ Andrew said.

‘The spouse is always the first person we think about. But we don't stop there. It's only a case of new avenues being opened.’

Andrew nodded and soon after took his leave. Walking back to the hotel, he began to think again of the attractions of returning to London. But he knew that he would not
do this until Peter was ready to go too. In his room he settled down to reading
Death Come Quickly.
He was wondering, as he began, if he would still be as much impressed by it as he had been when he had started it. He was prepared to be disappointed, but instead it seemed to him to develop in depth and skill as he read on. But he found it more and more difficult to believe that it had been written by Simon Amory, that cold and arrogant man.

He started trying to imagine what his wife had been like. If she had written this book then she had been certainly very intelligent, very sensitive, observant and warm-hearted. Not that those qualities need have shown on the surface. Someone had said something about her being very shy and quiet. Who had that been? He could not remember for sure, but had a feeling that it might have been one of the Clarkes. Anyway, the Clarkes had known her during the time when she had been slowly dying, and perhaps had been writing this book and it seemed that they had never thought of her as a writer. Andrew wondered if the truth about the matter would ever be known. If Simon Amory stuck to it that he had written the book as after all perhaps he had, how was anyone to prove that he had not done so?

Perhaps Rachel Rayne could have done so, but was there anyone else?

Andrew went downstairs presently for his tea and his cream bun. But just as he was about to take the cream bun from the trolley that had been pushed up to his chair, he changed his mind and took a sober piece of gingerbread instead. Peter joined him there and chose a slice of sponge sandwich. It seemed to Andrew that he was looking older than he usually did. The events of the last few days seemed to have added several years to his age. Andrew wondered if the truth was that Peter was more frightened than he wanted anyone to know. To try to relieve him of some of the weight on his mind Andrew told him of Mayhew's
idea that Magda Braile had been killed before Rachel Rayne and that that made it possible that Desmond Nicholl was her murderer. Peter nodded gravely with an absent expression on his face, but said nothing.

Just then one of the waitresses came in and said to Peter, 'Mr Dilly, you're wanted on the telephone.’

Getting up and muttering something about who the devil was that, Peter followed her out. In a couple of minutes he was back again.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we're going up to Amory's.’

‘Why, what's happened?’ Andrew asked.

‘That was Gooch,’ Peter said. ‘Amory's manservant.

They've just found Amory in the garden. Beaten up.’

‘Beaten up - Amory?’ Andrew exclaimed as he got to his feet. ‘Why did Gooch phone you?’

But Peter was already halfway to the door. Andrew said no more until they were in Peter's car and had started up the steep road towards Amory's house. Then he repeated the question. ‘Why did the man phone you?’

‘Because I've been staying there in the house and he supposed I was a close friend of Amory's,’ Peter replied.

‘Did you tell him to call the police?’

‘I did, yes, but it seems Amory told him not to.’

‘He's conscious then.’

‘Or was, for a little while. I told him to call the doctor and he said he'd already done that.’

When they reached the house they found that the doctor had arrived ahead of them. A car, which Andrew presumed was his, was in the drive in front of the door, which was open. But as they were about to enter, a voice called to them from the direction of the summerhouse and a man in a white jacket came running up to them. It was the man who had served the dinner on the Friday evening.

‘He's in the summerhouse, sir,’ he panted. ‘I found him just outside it and I thought I'd get him inside rather than
leave him lying there. He may not know you. He didn't know me when I found him, then when I began to move him he suddenly come to and said what the hell did I think I was doing. So I said I was just moving him on to the couch where he'd be more comfortable and then I'd call the police and he said no, I wasn't to think of doing that. So I said I'd get the doctor and he said all right, do that and then he seemed to pass out again.’