Cold, Lone and Still (12 page)

Hera was already home again. She had gone off on the Monday before Sandy travelled north on the Wednesday. She looked so haggard and exhausted that I was quite concerned and asked her whether she had been whooping it up in Paris. She turned on me in a bad temper and said that, if Sandy and I would see reason and take her into the partnership, she could give up the modelling jobs and all the travelling they entailed. She was in no state to be argued with, so I advised her to take things easy for a bit. This was at the office, where she had dropped in to tell me she was back. I was worried and I sent my secretary home with her with instructions to see that she had something to eat, and then went to bed. Our Miss Moore (Elsa to Sandy and me) is both firm and sympathetic. In any case, a woman is far better at coping with another woman than ever a man can be.

‘She is very tired and upset,’ said Miss Moore upon her return to the office. ‘She wanted to come in again tomorrow to help out while Alexander is away, but I told her that we had the Pallister contract to negotiate and her presence would only be a distraction, not a help.’

‘I hope you convinced her,’ I said. ‘She has wasted quite enough of our time already. People can’t come into a busy office and pick up the threads as though they were picking up dropped stitches in a piece of knitting.’

‘That is a very clever way of putting it, Comrie.’ (We all used first names in the office.)

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m a very brainy bloke when I make the effort.’ Elsa and I had a very pleasant no-nonsense relationship and I valued it very much.

Exactly what she had said to Hera I do not know, but whatever it was it seemed to have been effective, for Hera did not show up again at the office. I went round to see her each evening. She seemed unusually subdued. I would have told her about the thuggish attack on Sandy, but as soon as he got back he had repeated his request that I should not mention it. Hera enquired whether I had heard about his holiday, so I thought the safest thing was to say that since his return he had talked of nothing much except the proposed visit to Stockholm. This, up to a point, was true, although I could not understand at the time why I was not to mention to Hera that he had been attacked by a mugger in the well-named Mugdock Wood. As it turned out, he had not felt well enough to search for the stone building.

He telephoned me from Stockholm, told me everything was going very nicely and asked after Hera. He had negotiated contracts for two of our authors and obviously was feeling pleased with himself. I asked how his injuries were getting on. He said his arm and shoulder were still badly bruised and rather stiff, but the head wound was not troubling him and a woman at the book fair had told him that it gave him a very romantic appearance and had asked whether it was the result of a duel.

I was very glad to see him back. I was having a sticky time with Hera, who had recovered her health but not her temper, and my lot was not being made easier by the publisher of one of our authors who wanted us to persuade the lady to agree to a ten per cent royalty instead of the twelve and a half which she claimed she had been promised by word of mouth in the publisher’s office. She had nothing in writing, but stuck to her story and negotiations (if the acrimonious exchanges could be so called) were still going on when Sandy returned to the office and sorted things out.

‘Ten per cent and a slightly larger advance,’ he said to our author. ‘I can get them to agree to that, I’m sure. After all, Delia dear, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and money in your bank account is better than looking for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Let’s put down a few figures on a bit of paper and then I’ll take you out to lunch.’

‘Thank God,’ I said to him later, ‘for the authors who
don’t
come to see us!’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I do feel that the personal touch is important. Besides, she’s not a bad old girl. As a matter of fact, I’m quite sure she
really
thinks she was promised twelve and a half.’

‘Not on the first five thousand,’ I said. ‘Not on
her
sales!’

‘She’s industrious and keeps up her output. We don’t want to lose her.’

‘
You
may not!’ I said, remembering various passages at arms we had had with the lady over a number of years.

‘How is Hera?’ he asked.

‘Prickly. I wonder what happened when she took that trip to Paris? I think something there must have upset her. Besides, she’s still brooding over our refusal to take her into partnership. We thought she would kick up sooner or later, and she has.’

‘I’m sorry about that, Comrie, but you agree it wouldn’t do, don’t you? Within a week she’d be trying to boss the whole show. We’ve always realised that, so we must both stand firm.’

‘Oh, I’ll hold the fort,’ I said. ‘It’s becoming a war of attrition, but I certainly shan’t give in.’

He looked at his reflection in a picture which hung on the office wall and touched the scar which ran down the right side of his forehead. It still looked rather angry, I thought. Knowing what I knew at that juncture, I ought to have recognised his touching it as being a symbolic gesture, but on this occasion what Hera (talking unkindly about my predilection for stumbling over dead bodies) has called my ‘ESP or whatever’ gave me no help at all.

S
andy had been back for less than a week when we had a prospective client. He was a surprise item if ever there were such a thing, but before he presented himself we had another visitor. This was young Trickett. News of his arrival reached us by way of the usual channels. Briggs, our office boy, reported to Polly, the senior typist of what she proudly called her ‘pool’ — herself and two youngsters fresh from commercial college — that: ‘There’s a young guy in horn-rims and a dirty sweater wants to see Mr Melrose.’

Polly translated this to Elsa as: ‘There’s a kind of poet-type in jeans and a roll-neck pullover. He is asking for Mr Melrose. Says his name is Trickett.’

From Elsa came the amendment: ‘A rather dingy literary llama — see Hilaire Belloc — wants an interview, Comrie. I don’t remember anybody on the books named Lucius Trickett, so he can’t be one of ours. Will you see him?’ (All this lovely informality would have gone, I knew, if we had taken Hera into partnership.)

‘Trickett? Oh, yes, I know him. Send him in,’ I said.

‘That’s the student bloke, isn’t it?’ said Sandy. ‘I’ll leave him to you.’ He went to his own office, taking Elsa with him, and Trickett came in.

‘Awfully sorry to bother you in business hours,’ he said, ‘but it seemed better than calling at your flat. I say, you know, it’s getting a bit much, you know.’

‘Bingley?’ Iasked.

‘Yes, indeed. Won’t let us alone, you know. Now we’ve done the geology of The Way, we’ve got stacks of notes to collate and specimens to label before term starts, and it’s nothing but interruptions and all this endless questioning and going over the old ground time and time again. He has even got the Glasgow police to chase up Perth. I had a letter this morning. As for poor old Bull, they absolutely hound him. What’s to be done, Melrose?’

‘Goodness knows.’

‘And a fat lot of help
that
is! Sorry! Not your fault, I know, but it really is too sickening. We’ve nowhere to get together except at the hall of residence and there our work is continually interrupted by this snooping copper.’

‘The get-together,’ I said, ‘does it include Coral and Patsy?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Are they residents, then?’

‘Of course not. It’s the men’s hall, but we need the two girls because of working on the West Highland project. The warden is in residence now, of course, and he shoos the girls out every day as soon as we’ve all had tea.’

‘He wasn’t in residence at the time of the party, though.’

‘No, he was still on vacation, but he’s been in the house ever since.’

‘The hall, during term, was only for men,’ I said, ‘so the women at the party would not have known about that passage to the cloakroom.’

‘Naturally not. We had permission for them to use the warden’s own accommodation on the first floor. Patsy and Coral had been briefed beforehand and were to tell the other women — Jane Minch and Miss Camden and Tansy and Rhoda and the girls in the orchestra, you know — where to go if they wanted to powder up.’

‘I don’t know why,’ I said, ‘but it had not occurred to me that the hall was unknown territory to the women students. One takes so much for granted in these days of girls invading boys’ public schools and infiltrating men’s colleges at the universities.’

‘I hardly think there are unisex dormitories, though,’ said Lucius Trickett. ‘Anyway, you have it right with regard to our present predicament. Except for Patsy and Coral, the women had never been on the premises before. There is a strict rule against parties at the halls of residence. The dances are always held at the poly itself. That’s why everything is so sickening, because I had a hell of a job to get the warden to agree to the Highland Way party and now, although it was no fault of mine, I feel I’ve let him down. If the party had been only for poly people, he would never have given permission, but it was for the Highland lot and now an outsider has to go and get himself murdered. It really is too bad.’

I sympathised, but could offer no help. I had learned something, however, which had changed my views more than a little. Had it not been for the corpse in the ruins on Rannoch Moor, I would have thought that the stab in the back which had killed poor Carbridge was more of a woman’s than a man’s crime, but even though the Rannoch murder was known to have been committed by a man, that man was an habitual criminal and, to such, the ordinary rules of fair play do not apply. More than once, when I thought about the poly murder — and it was seldom out of my mind — I had considered the possibility of its having been committed by a woman. Now, however, Trickett appeared to have made that idea improbable. It seemed that only the men would have known where that dark passage was. The women concerned were likely to have been ignorant of the layout of the building.

I re-visualised what I myself knew of it. We had been admitted at the front door by Trickett himself and had been led straight past the main staircase to the common-room where the orchestra, consisting of several young men and three girls, was already assembled. We had been greeted by Patsy in all the erotic splendour of her Turkish get-up. The room had three doors, the one by which we had entered, the one I had opened to get out and smoke my cigarette and by which Coral and Freddie had brought in the relays of food, and a third door which I had been told led only to a small wing which housed the sick-bay and which was always kept locked unless one of the students was ill.

Bull, it was clear, had been stationed where I saw him so that he could answer any telephone calls, since the telephone would hardly have been audible anywhere else with so much noise going on in the common-room. There was bound to be a telephone in the warden’s quarters, I assumed, but, at the time, the warden was not in residence.

So much for Bull’s having been stationed where I found him and for Trickett’s having opened the front door to the guests. It followed that the only woman who might know of the passage in which I had stumbled upon the body was Coral, who would have passed Bull’s end of the passage when she and Freddie were rushing down Bull’s corridor with the trays of food. It was in the highest degree unlikely, however, that she had enquired where the little passage led or even noticed it particularly, and equally unlikely that Freddie would have mentioned it to her considering that it led straight to the men’s cloakroom.

I thought of the electric lightbulb which was missing. Bull had put off replacing it because to put in another one meant going and getting a ladder. I did not know where the ladder was kept, but I assumed that Detective-Inspector Bingley had long ago dealt with this point. Bull had been lax, of course, but that, in itself, was not a criminal offence.

Bull himself was certainly too short to have been able to remove or replace the bulb without a ladder, but he had been seated on an ordinary kitchen chair, so I wondered why it had not occurred to him to use that to stand on.

I considered the other men. Todd and Trickett were both tall enough to have reached the bulb without the aid of a ladder, and, although they both topped me, I too was tall enough to have reached it, and so, come to that, was Carbridge himself, who was just about my own height. The puzzle which nobody had solved was how and why Carbridge had been in the house before the party was due to begin. He was not an ex-poly man, so would not have known automatically of the basement entrance left open for the students. I wondered who had put him wise or had brought him there so early.

I wondered how much strength it took to plunge a knife into a man’s heart. Todd, I assumed, would have had no difficulty and, although Trickett was a string-bean of a fellow, he was wiry and tough and might have put on a lot of muscle by dint of his delving and chipping on the tour in Scotland. This might even apply to the female geologists, too. They had appeared to be working even harder than the men when Hera and I saw them at it.

There remained Andrew Perth, but by that time there was little doubt that Bingley and the Glasgow police could account for his movements during the period under review. There was the question of alibis for the rest of us. On the day of the party, provided that the doctors had estimated the time of death more or less correctly, Hera and I were able to provide alibis for one another irrespective of shop girls, cinema attendants and all the rest of it, so long as the police were prepared to take the word of an engaged couple. All the same, I still hoped that nobody had mentioned to Bingley the punch-up I had had with Carbridge at Crianlarich.

It was at this point in my meditations that our unexpected client arrived and was announced by the hierarchy in ascending order of importance thus:

Briggs to Polly
: ‘Little old geezer stinking of mothballs in his best suit wants to see Mr Melrose.’

Polly to Elsa
: ‘Something off the shop floor called Bull is asking for Mr Melrose and won’t be happy till he gets him.’

Elsa to me
: ‘There’s a Mr Bull, Comrie. Seems harmless, but may have a bomb concealed on his person.’

Trickett
: ‘Oh, well, I’ll be going. Do what you can for Bull, won’t you?’)

Me
: ‘Show the visitor in. Goodbye, then, Lucius.’

Elsa (when Trickett had gone)
: ‘I don’t know where you pick them up, but it’s your choice.’