Murder by the Book (20 page)

He looked up at Maria, advancing into the room with her fingers to her lips. ‘Call an ambulance and the police!' he called. ‘Quickly!'

She was sobbing. ‘There's a phone in the hall …' She stumbled away in shock.

As soon as she was gone, Langham looked around in desperation and snatched an antimacassar from a nearby chair. Anything, he thought, to staunch the flow of blood. He wadded the material and pressed it to the wound.

Maria appeared a minute later. ‘They're on their way.'

‘Come here and take over,' Langham ordered. ‘There's nothing we can do but try to stem the bleeding.' As Maria knelt beside him and took the rapidly soaking material, he rushed across to a small bar in the corner of the room and found what he was looking for. He returned to the hearth with a handful of bar towels and dropped them beside Maria.

She looked up at him, tears in her eyes. ‘Donald?'

He moved to the French windows and peered out. The gunman was at the far end of the vast lawn, disappearing into the shrubbery. Without a thought as to the possible danger Langham gave chase, sprinting from the library and across the lawn and ignoring Maria's faint cry behind him. With luck he would have surprise on his side, and might even succeed in running the gunman to ground in the woods.

He came to the border of shrubbery and dived through. He stopped and listened intently, making out the crash of someone running through the undergrowth to his right. He set off, following the sound and wishing that he was still armed with Ralph Ryland's revolver. Failing that, he should have thought to pick up a poker from beside the hearth. Though, on second thoughts, a poker would be little use against a killer armed with a pistol.

He was beginning to flag, his breath ragged and painful. Twenty yards further on the wood was bisected by a muddy lane. Langham remained in the cover of a laurel tree and peered out. Fifty yards to his left the gunman was mounting a motorbike. As Langham watched, impotent, the man kicked the bike into life and skidded off down the lane. Seconds later he passed from sight around a bend and Langham felt an odd sense of relief and frustration that he had been unable to apprehend the gunman.

He turned and ran through the woods, fearing that when he returned to the library he would find Charles Elder dead and Maria beside herself with grief.

A minute later he came to the French windows and stepped inside. Maria was still on the floor beside Charles's body, and when Langham entered she looked up with vast brown eyes veneered by tears. She pressed down on Charles's massive chest, holding one of the bar towels which was quickly turning red as it blotted the blood. The pathetic sight of it, and Maria's desperate efforts to save his agent's life, brought tears to his eyes.

He took up another towel and knelt beside her. She removed her sodden one and instantly blood pooled. He applied the second towel and pressed, knowing in his heart of hearts that the gesture was futile.

He stared down at Charles's waxy face. His agent seemed unconscious, unaware of what had happened and hopefully in no pain.

‘It was the same gunman,' Langham murmured. ‘He got away on a motorbike.'

Maria stared at him. Big tears tracked down her cheeks. She shook her head. ‘I don't understand,' she sobbed. ‘Why would he do this?'

Langham stared down at Maria's hands, which appeared to be wearing gloves of dripping crimson. He glanced at his own hands, feeling the heat of Charles's lifeblood.

He experienced a succession of very intense, rapid emotions: sorrow and anger, visceral repulsion at the physical effect of one small bullet, followed by a numbing sense of shock which seemed to crash through him, rendering him speechless.

He found himself thinking: no more grandiloquent monologues, no more expansive, trademark stories of his younger days; no more heartfelt soliloquies praising the finer things of life; no more wonderful, frivolous, generous queer old Charles Elder.

He had the sudden vision of Charles at breakfast a few days ago, singing the praises of the humble kidney …

He felt a sensation in his throat like acid and tears stung his eyes. His hands otherwise occupied, he was unable to do anything other than let the tears flow.

It seemed like an hour later, though it might have been just minutes, when he heard the sound of vehicles crunching gravel in the drive.

He looked at Maria. ‘The ambulance, with luck. Hurry and tell them where we are.'

She nodded and dashed off, and he turned the towel in order to find a dry section with which to soak up the blood. It was still pumping out, which he supposed was a good sign as it signalled that Charles was hanging on to life.

Two ambulance men, followed by Maria, a sergeant and a constable, hurried into the library. The ambulance men crossed to Langham and knelt beside Charles. One of them swore pithily and the other told Langham, in unceremonious terms, to give them room.

Langham stood and backed away, looking down at his blood-soaked hands. Maria passed him a towel, already stained with blood from her own hands. They crossed to a chaise longue and sat down while, across the room, the ambulance men cut away Charles's waistcoat and worked on the wound.

The next ten minutes passed in a blur. He was aware of recounting what had happened to the sergeant, who took down his statement in a tiny notebook. The ambulance men loaded Charles on to a stretcher and manoeuvred him – with difficulty – from the library. As they passed, Maria stood hesitantly and approached them. ‘Do you think …?' she began.

The leading ambulance man didn't spare her a glance as he eased the stretcher through the door, but said, ‘Never can tell, love. But I'd pray, if I were you.'

She returned to Langham's side, clutched his hand and asked the sergeant if they would be allowed to follow the ambulance to the hospital.

‘I'm sorry, miss. I've called in an Inspector Bryce from Bury St Edmunds. He should be here in five minutes. By all means, after he's taken your statements …'

Maria nodded and dried her eyes on a small lace kerchief.

The sergeant moved to the door, where he stationed himself next to the constable.

Maria said in barely a whisper, ‘But, Donald …' She pressed her fingers to her temples and screwed her eyes shut. She opened them and stared at him. ‘It doesn't make sense!'

Numb, he said, ‘What doesn't?'

‘Why would the motorcyclist – the very same man who blackmailed Charles … why would he murder him? It just doesn't make sense!'

‘I know,' he said. ‘It's the same question we asked ourselves earlier, when we wondered why the blackmailer sent the incriminating photographs to the police. Why would he terminate a potentially lucrative source of income? Now we're asking ourselves why would the blackmailer want to
kill
Charles?'

Maria shook her head. ‘I don't know. I just don't know!'

Langham thought about it. He had the inkling of an idea, and said tentatively, ‘Perhaps we've been looking at it from the wrong angle.'

She pouted her lips at him in a typically French gesture. ‘We are?'

‘Perhaps the blackmail was just a ruse. Perhaps the blackmailer designed the entire charade, the photos, the blackmail, to …'

She was watching him with big eyes as he formulated his thoughts. ‘OK,' he went on. ‘I'm thinking aloud here … But what if the gunman never planned to shoot Charles in this way?'

She shrugged. ‘I do not understand.'

‘We interrupted the gunman, didn't we? How about this – the gunman shot Charles in panic because we'd arrived on the scene and I was battering the door down. But he never intended to shoot him
like that
.'

Maria said, ‘So … what did he intend to do?'

Langham stared at the blood-soaked rug and murmured, ‘He intended to kill Charles, but stage the killing so that it appeared to be a suicide. He'd rig it so that the police, and everyone else, would take it as the suicide of a man depressed about the fact that he would soon be sent to jail.'

Maria stared at him. ‘But who would do that, Donald?'

‘Someone who had such a grudge against Charles that they wanted him dead, but dead in such a way as to make it appear at first glance like suicide. Then the killer would not be implicated in the death.'

She was silent for a while, then said, ‘Poor, poor Charles.'

‘What I'd like to know,' Langham went on, ‘is who might bear Charles such a grudge that they would want to kill him? He doesn't have an enemy in the world, does he? You work with him – you know his contacts in publishing.'

‘Charles is well liked. I've never met anyone who has a bad word to say about him. I know this is a cliché, but he was –
is
– a good man.'

Five minutes later Inspector Bryce from Bury St Edmunds arrived, a thin, dour-faced Lancastrian in his forties. He questioned Langham and Maria in much greater detail than the sergeant had, and Langham gave him the background details concerning the blackmail and the motorbike-riding gunman.

Bryce looked up from his notebook. ‘But why would the blackmailer resort to murder?'

Langham repeated what he'd told Maria about his suicide theory.

‘Well, it's a possibility, I suppose,' Bryce said grudgingly. ‘I'll liaise with my London colleagues on the matter. I'd like you to accompany me to the station where I'll take a more formal statement, if you don't mind.'

Langham glanced across the room at the blood-soaked rug on which Charles had lain.

Inspector Bryce said, ‘Do you know if Mr Elder had next of kin who need informing, miss?'

‘He had no one,' Maria said.

They left the house and followed Inspector Bryce and his colleague back to the station at Bury St Edmunds.

It was getting on for eight later that evening when Bryce concluded that he had all the necessary information and allowed them to go. The inspector gave Langham the directions to the hospital to which Charles had been admitted, and the sun was going down in a gorgeous laminate of tangerine and pewter as they left the police station and made the short drive to the infirmary.

Five minutes later, after giving their names at reception, a matron told them that due to the severity of his wounds Charles had been transferred by ambulance to the Chelsea Royal Hospital in London, where he was due to undergo an emergency operation upon arrival.

‘We'll go straight to the hospital,' Langham said as they returned to the car. ‘I'd rather be there, for all the good it'll do, than go straight home.'

Maria nodded. ‘I agree, Donald.'

They set off on the long drive south to London.

They were silent for what seemed like an age, in contrast to earlier in the day when they had talked non-stop. At last Maria said quietly, ‘I'm not sure, Donald, that I want to spend the night alone in my flat.'

He nodded. ‘I have a spare bedroom at my place, if you'd care to …?'

She smiled at him. ‘If you don't mind, that is.'

‘Of course not.'

Another, longer silence settled between them.

They drove through Epping Forest, with dark and encroaching trees on either side. Oddly the lights of London, when they drove through Walthamstow thirty minutes later, seemed equally as threatening, as if their gaudy brightness did nothing but emphasize the surrounding darkness.

One hour later they were back at Langham's flat, having stopped at the Chelsea Royal only to be told that Charles had just gone into the operating theatre and would be under the knife for a couple of hours – and then would be in no fit state to receive visitors. They had decided to go home and return first thing in the morning.

Langham made a pot of Earl Grey and carried the tray into the front room overlooking the quiet street.

Maria stood and, cup and saucer in hand, moved to the hearth. He watched her as she examined the photographs lined up on the mantelshelf: sepia prints of his mother and father in their younger days, one or two of himself as a child, and wartime photographs taken by colleagues in Madagascar and India.

She placed her cup on the mantelshelf and picked up the photograph of Langham and his wife, taken shortly after their wedding in 'thirty-seven.

‘Who is this, Donald?'

He said, ‘Susan, my wife.'

She looked him. ‘Charles told me that …'

Langham moved to her side. ‘She died, back in 'forty-one.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘I was stationed up in Fife. On exercises with field security. I had a telegram from her sister. Susan had collapsed at work – the sorting office at Hackney post office. Apparently she died instantly. Cerebral haemorrhage.'

He would never forget the train journey south from Edinburgh, the intolerable delays at every station between there and King's Cross. He would never forget the pain of knowing that Susan was dead, nor the guilt that underlay the sadness: guilt at the fact that he could not help but feel an incredible sense of being freed from a terrible incarceration.

A guilt that resurfaced still, from time to time, and kept him awake at night.

‘Things hadn't been well between us for years,' he said. ‘Looking back, I realize it wasn't a successful marriage.' He smiled. ‘She was my very first girlfriend, and Susan wasn't much more experienced. My father advised against it, but I was only twenty-one when we met.'

He often wondered what might have happened had Susan not died back in 'forty-one, if their marriage would have stumbled on, each of them too weak and hidebound by convention to suggest separation; if they would have remained together in the mutually, emotionally injurious union … The thought appalled him, and only increased his guilt at the sense of liberation he felt then and still felt to this day.

‘She was very pretty.'

He found himself saying, ‘I can't really see that. All I recall when I look at the picture is the argument we had immediately after it was taken … and I can't even remember what we argued about.'