Murder by the Book (23 page)

Langham waited for her to continue, his apprehension mounting.

‘The thing is … Nigel hasn't returned. He's been away over two days now and I must say I'm getting worried.' Another pause, then: ‘I don't know quite how to say this, but … Nigel has from time to time spent a night away from home, but never like this, without telling me beforehand.'

Langham told himself that there was no reason to fear that anything had happened to Lassiter, but at the same time a nasty, pernicious voice in the back of his head was saying that there was every reason.

‘OK.' He tried to sound businesslike. ‘Nigel said he'd had a letter from the solicitor. Do you know if he took it with him?'

‘I checked. I found it on his desk. The thing is … I rang the phone number, but there was no reply. The line seems to be disconnected.'

‘I'm sure there's a simple explanation.' He paused. ‘Would you mind if I came over and took a look at the letter?'

She sounded relieved. ‘Would you? That would be wonderful. I don't mind admitting that I'm a little worried.'

‘Don't be,' he said, while feeling more than worried himself. ‘I'll be round in five minutes. Islington, isn't it? Belgrave Square?'

‘Number twenty-two, yes. Thank you so much.'

He cut the connection and hurried out, slipped into the Austin and motored to Islington.

As he drove he asked himself why Nigel Lassiter might stay away from home for more than two nights, especially as he was, in his own words, ‘under Caroline's thumb', and was usually scrupulous about keeping her informed as to his whereabouts.

He recalled his meeting with Jeff Mallory earlier and tried to dismiss his fears.

The three-storey Georgian town house stood in one of the most fashionable Islington squares, a grand white-fronted building that befitted a popular, best-selling author like Nigel Lassiter. As he climbed the steps and rang the doorbell, Langham thought back to the last time he'd been here – a launch party just after the war. He recalled Caroline Lassiter as a slim, vivacious host in her mid-thirties, just married to the older writer and delighted by her catch.

The woman who opened the door seemed much older than someone in her mid-forties, and Langham wondered if this was the result of a decade of marriage to a cynical scribbler with a drink problem. Caroline's piled hair was dishevelled and greying, and wrinkles around her eyes and mouth had been plastered over with a thick application of foundation.

‘Donald, I'm so grateful you could come. Please, this way …'

She led Langham along a thickly-carpeted corridor and up a short flight of stairs to a big room overlooking the square.

‘Nigel's study. Can I get you a drink?'

‘No, I'm fine. I've just had lunch.'

He looked around the room. Hundreds of books lined the walls, and next to a writing desk stood a bookcase containing what appeared to be all of Nigel's first editions, along with paperback editions and translations.

Caroline was worrying a strand of pearls around her neck. ‘Well, this is where the great man churns them out,' she said with more than a touch of sarcasm. Something about her uneven diction, and her flighty glances at him and away, suggested she'd calmed her nerves with a drink or two.

‘Is this the letter …?' He pointed to an envelope beside the typewriter. ‘May I?'

‘Please.'

She watched him closely, fingers to her rouged lips, as he slipped a single sheet of expensive writing paper from the envelope and unfolded it.

Below the letter-heading bearing the name of Cobley and Cotton, solicitors, and their address in Regent Street, the body of the letter informed Nigel about the cottage in Kent and suggested he meet a representative of the firm there on the Saturday morning.

‘Nigel has never, ever gone off like this before. He always calls if he's going to be late. I can only assume he's had an accident.'

‘And you say you've tried ringing …?' He held up the letter.

‘The line is completely dead.'

‘May I try?'

‘By all means.' She gestured towards a phone on the desk. Langham picked it up and rang the number. The line was silent.

He replaced the receiver. ‘Odd. Have you tried the directory?'

She nodded. ‘They were not listed, but then not every company is.'

‘Right.' He considered the options. ‘Do you mind if I take the letter? I'll drive over to Regent Street and see if I can learn anything there. I might even motor down to the cottage.' He glanced at the solicitor's letter and read the address: Ivy Cottage, Greenleaf Lane, Little Hadleigh.

Caroline smiled. ‘It was where he and Frankie Pearson worked, in the early days. I never met him, and from what Nigel says about him I think that was just as well – but what happened to the poor man was terrible. Nigel was awfully cut up about it. He felt guilty. I know he told you about it.'

Langham nodded. ‘But as I told Nigel, he had no reason to feel guilty. I would have done the same thing back then, had I been in Nigel's shoes.'

She smiled. ‘Nigel said you were a good man.'

Langham found himself colouring. ‘I'll be in touch when I've checked this,' he said, tapping the letter against his thigh.

She thanked him again as she showed him to the front door.

Langham returned to his Austin and drove from the square, trying to fathom what might account for Nigel's non-appearance. The obvious explanation was that Caroline was being economical with the facts: they'd had a spat and Nigel had used the trip to Kent as an excuse to cool off for a night or so … But that scenario did nothing to explain Caroline's apprehension.

Regent Street was busy with traffic which seemed to consist mainly of black cabs and omnibuses. He parked in a side street and walked south, counting off the buildings until he reached the twenties. A jeweller's shop occupied number twenty, and next door to that was a furrier. He looked for a door between the premises which might give access to stairs and the rooms where Cobley and Cotton had their offices.

He stood in the street, buffeted by pedestrians, holding the letter before him and staring blankly at the wall where the door should have been. There was no door. Number twenty-two Regent Street was the high-class furrier.

He wondered if the address in the letter was mistaken, and should be either thirty-two or twelve. Unlikely as this seemed, he nevertheless walked five buildings along in both directions to confirm his doubt: number twelve was a French restaurant and number thirty-two a tobacconist's shop.

He returned to number twenty-two and entered the furriers. An elderly gentleman behind the counter smiled benignly and asked if he might be of assistance. Feeling not a little silly, Langham proffered the letter and explained, ‘I'm trying to locate a company of solicitors by the name of Cobley and Cotton. As you can see, the address given here seems to be mistaken.'

The old man squinted at the letter, shaking his head. ‘I'm sorry, I can't be of any help. We've occupied this site for almost forty years, and I've never heard of Cobley and Cotton. You might try number thirty-two?'

Langham said he'd do that and left the building. He stood on the busy sunlit pavement and considered what to do next. He set off down the street, found a phone box, and got through to Maria at the agency.

‘Donald, where are you? It sounds busy!'

He smiled at the wonderful sound of her voice. ‘I'm in Regent Street, looking for a lost writer,' he said with a levity he did not feel.

‘What?'

He explained the situation and she interrupted, ‘I don't like the sound of this, Donald.'

‘I've got to go down to Kent. Nigel was due to meet a solicitor down there on Saturday. If I set off now, I should be back by around six.'

‘Donald … Please be careful, OK? For me?'

He smiled. ‘I'll be fine, Maria,' he said, and hung up.

He returned to the car and consulted his road map. The village of Little Hadleigh was situated five miles south of Hawkhurst, perhaps a little over an hour away from central London.

He decided not to consider the possibility that he might find something down there which would delay his return. In all likelihood he would come across nothing untoward, and Nigel would turn up of his own accord, drunkenly lachrymose and regretful after a two-day bender.

He left the capital in his wake and hit the open road. The traffic was light and the sun dazzling. He wound down the window and lodged his right arm on the sill. He was thinking of Maria, her big eyes and wonderful smile, but these pleasant thoughts were short-lived. He entered Tonbridge and passed the exclusive French restaurant on the main street to which Charles, in one of his expansive, generous moods, had insisted he take Langham in order to celebrate the publication of his twentieth novel. The evening, in the company of a select group of friends, was a memory he cherished.

He was sunk in melancholy for the remainder of the journey.

The village of Little Hadleigh proved to be another example of chocolate-box England, a rural backwater seemingly bypassed by the twentieth century. The obligatory village green boasted a duck pond overlooked by the twin custodians of a Norman church and a half-timbered public house, The Duck and Drake.

His was the only car abroad in the village that day, and the grumble of the engine, when he left it idling while he popped into the post office to ask for directions to Greenleaf Lane, seemed raucous on his return.

He passed the pub, turned right and motored on for half a mile before he came to a tiny red-stone cottage set back in an overgrown rose garden. He looked up and down the lane, but there was no sign of Nigel Lassiter's car. He pulled up and examined the property.

The downstairs window frames were rotten, the glass grey and cracked. The front door, likewise, was in need of attention, and the roof tiles had suffered slippage in many places.

He climbed from the car, walked up the garden path and knocked on the front door, the timber spongy beneath his knuckles. There was no reply, as he'd expected, and he stepped across the unkempt lawn and peered in through the tiny front window.

The sitting room was bare of furniture, the plasterwork of the far wall exposed to the laths in great patches. He knocked again, then moved around the side of the house and came to the back garden.

It must have been beautiful once, with a lawn and climbing roses and a couple of apple trees, but like the rest of the property the garden had been left to its own devices and nature had run rampant. He pushed at the back door, expecting it to be locked, but to his surprise it swung open at his touch.

He opened it further and stepped inside.

The entrance gave on to a poky tiled kitchen, which he crossed and entered a small hallway. To the right was a living room, and to the left a room which once, he guessed, had passed as a study. Bookshelves lined the walls, and a couple of them still held half-a-dozen mouldering paperbacks. He crossed the room and took down one of the books, an imported American thriller bearing the lurid illustration of a half-naked woman and an even more lurid title,
She Killed for Love
. Beside the window was an old desk, and Langham wondered if this was where, before the war, Lassiter and Pearson had bashed out their collaborative potboilers.

The house stank of damp and mice. He hurried back into the sunlight and fresh air, stood outside the back door and stared down the long garden.

He was wondering if the journey down here had been a waste of time when he glimpsed, in the grass beside the crumbled path, the tab end of a cigarette. He knelt and peered at the filter; it appeared fresh, and the brand-name printed above the speckled beige paper was Pall Mall.

The brand Nigel Lassiter chain-smoked.

He saw another filter a couple of yards away and moved to it. Pall Mall, again. And again, like the first, it appeared to have been recently smoked.

So Nigel had been here, standing in the garden, perhaps enjoying a cigarette in the sunlight while awaiting the arrival of the solicitor's representative.

Then he saw the third discarded butt, and something about this one – the distinctive, darker colouration of its filter paper – caused his heart to beat a little faster.

Rather than pick it up and destroy any fingerprint evidence, he knelt to examine it. The cigarette had been smoked right down to the filter, obliterating any identifying trade-name. He lowered his face to the ground and sniffed. The odour was distinctive: Camel.

He stood and looked around the garden as if suddenly fearing he might be under surveillance, despite knowing how irrational that fear was.

He was staring down the length of the garden when he saw the vegetable patch, or what he took at first to be a vegetable patch, concealed behind a tangle of overgrown raspberry canes.

But what was a freshly dug vegetable patch doing in the middle of a garden that had been neglected for years?

Heart thudding, he walked down the garden until he came to the dark rectangle of recently turned earth.

He knelt beside the soil and crumbled its loam between his fingertips. The patch was perhaps six feet long, three wide, and its resemblance to a grave was unmistakable. He closed his eyes, feeling dizzy.

To his right was a dilapidated timber hut, leaning so much that it had assumed a parallelogram shape. He stood and yanked open the door. A spade was propped up inside, with soil on its blade. He reached out to take the spade, then stopped himself.

Another spade stood against the far wall. He took this one and paused before the rectangle of recently dug earth. He knew that he should leave this for the police, but he wanted to have his suspicion, his fear, proved either right or wrong.

He began digging tentatively, not wanting to drive the blade too deep for fear of cutting into whatever might be down there. He piled the discarded soil further down the dug patch, expecting to feel the solidity of something buried every time he carefully stamped the spade into the ground. He was sweating within minutes, the sunlight burning his neck.