Murder by the Book (33 page)

A small, balding man wrapped in a stained grey mackintosh smiled up at him. ‘Ah, Mr Langham.'

‘Can I help you?'

‘I think you most certainly can.'

Only then did Langham see that the man was holding something.

He looked again at the man's face – and saw that the artist's impression had got it right. The fat, the unhealthy pallor, the tiny eyes and the small, vindictive mouth.

Frankie Pearson aimed the pistol directly at Langham's chest.

He managed, ‘What do you want?'

‘Oh, come, Mr Langham. That's hardly an original line, is it? A trifle clichéd? Prompted more through fear, I suspect, than genuine enquiry. It sounds as stilted as a line from one of your books. What do you think I want?'

Later it came to him that he should have jumped Pearson there and then, on the threshold in full view of the street, where he might have been more circumspect about shooting. But at the time he was too frozen with shock to think of anything as elemental as survival.

Then the moment was over.

Pearson gestured with the pistol. ‘Turn around and walk up the stairs.'

Langham turned slowly and dragged one foot after the other up the stairs. He heard Pearson enter the hallway and the sound of him kicking the door shut with his heel. He expected to hear the Yale lock click. When the sound failed to reach him, he stored the fact away for possible future use. The door had not shut fully, so if in the next few minutes he were able to overpower Pearson and flee, then he would not have to waste valuable seconds unfastening the catch.

If only he could overpower Pearson, he thought.

He reached the top of the stairs. The only sound he could hear was the thud of his own heartbeat, and when Pearson spoke it seemed to come from a long way away.

‘In there.'

Langham obeyed. He walked into the study and stared at his desk and his books which, just minutes ago, had seemed like the belongings of another person. Now their welcome familiarity seemed, to him, heartbreaking.

‘Sit down at the desk and turn the chair to face me.'

Langham sat down, and when he turned the chair he saw that Pearson had perched himself on the armchair beside the window, holding the pistol in his lap. It would only take him a second to raise it, take aim …

Langham decided to bide his time and hope Pearson wanted to talk.

The little man seemed inordinately happy. ‘You walked into it, Langham.'

The words wrong-footed him. ‘Into what?'

Pearson laughed. He really was a most obnoxious little man. He seemed to have shrunk since the last time they had met, almost ten years ago, and he was also fatter and seedier. His face had the pasty pallor and the rheumy eyes of a seasoned alcoholic.

‘I mean the hotel ruse,' Pearson said. ‘I couldn't really lose, could I? Either you went to the hotel like a lamb to the slaughter, having not put two and two together and realized what I was doing, or you worked out my ruse and called in your police chums. All I had to do was keep watch on your little girlfriend's place this morning and, as soon as I saw Mallory arrive, I knew.' He smiled. ‘I imagine they'll be on their way there as we speak. What a surprise they'll receive when they find a small hotel run by a retired colonel and his wife.'

‘But I spoke—' Langham began.

‘Of course you spoke to me, but the number you rang wasn't the hotel's. Not that you should castigate yourself for not checking. How were you to know of my little plan, after all?'

‘And if we'd not suspected anything and gone to the hotel?'

‘I had a room booked in your name, and I'd booked myself into the neighbouring room. I would have followed you, and …' He smiled. ‘But now you will die in a different way.'

Langham stared levelly at Pearson. He would have thought that in the situation he would have felt fear. The odd thing was, despite knowing what Pearson intended, he felt calm: he felt not so much fear, he realized, as disbelief that the events would work themselves out in Pearson's favour.

He was determined to retain his dignity, and smiled at the thought. Maria would have laughed at his typically English, stiff-upper-lip attitude.

‘What is it that you find so funny?' Pearson enquired. ‘Humour, I assure you, is not at all the appropriate emotion to be feeling now.'

Langham said, as words now were his only weapon, ‘I was thinking how utterly pathetic you are, you and your wasted life: the dreadful hackwork, and now the murder of people better and more talented than yourself.'

‘Dreadful hackwork? I like that. That's truly rich coming from your lips, the man who made the formulaic detective story his forte. I could never work out your popularity, Langham. Your novels are no better than mine, but I suppose it's a case of not what you know, but who you know. You got in with that terrible queen Charles Elder, and isn't one of your editors an old army chum? How could you fail, with friends on the inside to pull the strings?'

Langham smiled, refusing to be drawn. ‘That's what it's all about, isn't it? Jealousy. Is that why you're here, Pearson, because you're envious of my success?'

The small, plump hand holding the gun twitched, and a spasm of irritation crossed Pearson's face. ‘Jealousy? Do you really think I'm motivated by an emotion as shallow as jealousy? It has nothing to do with jealousy, Langham, but with vengeance – a much more valid motivation, don't you think?'

Langham shrugged. ‘That, Pearson, is a matter of opinion.'

‘I worked hard at my craft. I worked on my first book for a year, and you can't even begin to imagine my delight when Elder took me on and found a publisher. And what happened then? Three books down the line, the bastard cut the lifeline, set me adrift …'

Langham said, ‘The books were bad, Pearson. They didn't sell, and Charles was a businessman. There's no room for sentimentality in his line of work.'

‘I could have allowed that to set me back, Langham, but I told myself I was better than that. I wouldn't stop what I loved doing just because some talentless agent didn't like my work. I sold a dozen books after he dropped me. I proved him wrong.'

How could he be so deluded, Langham wondered; the dozen books he'd sold in the thirties were pseudonymous westerns.

‘And then I struck lucky. My persistence was rewarded. I met Nigel Lassiter. Young Nigel. I had quite a thing for him, at the time. Not that I let him see that – not Nigel, big, bluff, homophobic Nigel. We wrote three good thrillers together, and then he did the dirty, ditched me … and immediately after that Max Sidley turned down my solo effort with a rejection letter so cruel I never forgot a word of it. I even quoted it while killing him.'

Pearson's eyes glazed over, and a smile came to his lips as if reliving the moment he murdered his ex-editor.

‘But I soldiered on, as you do. I went back to the cowboy books and knocked out half a dozen a year for good old Hubert and Shale. When the war came I was exempted from military service on medical grounds, so I continued writing between periods of fire-watching. Boys' adventure stories, school stories for the girls' annuals – I churned it out, no keeping me down. Then I made a lucky contact after the war, met an old school chum who worked as an editor for Pritchard. They were looking to start a line of detective stories, and I thought here I go, a second chance at respectability … They took a couple, which sold reasonably well, and were about to commission another two when Gervaise Cartwright's vitriolic review of the second book came out and scuppered any chance of that deal.'

Langham couldn't help smiling. ‘You're looking for excuses, Pearson, and people to blame. The bad review did nothing to queer the deal, if you'll excuse the phrase. Do you think Pritchard would have given a damn about what Cartwright wrote, however critical?'

Pearson stared at him. ‘It certainly didn't help.'

Langham said, ‘Your pride was hurt – admit it. No one likes bad reviews.'

Pearson looked around the study, at the ranked books, the watercolours, and his gaze alighted on the row of Langham's titles on the bookcase beside the desk. He said, ‘So I went back to Hubert and Shale like a kicked dog.'

Langham stared at the little man and was surprised to see tears in his eyes.

‘And do you know the one person who stood by me during all those years? Who believed in me and my novels? My agent, good old Dorothy. She was a stalwart, finding me work during the lean years, constantly reassuring me, fighting my corner. She
believed
in me.'

She pitied you, Langham thought, and she wanted her seven-and-a-half per cent.

‘And then, in 'forty-seven, I had another break. A deal for Wilkins to produce three whodunits with the promise of more if they sold … And what happened?'

‘Let me guess. They didn't sell?'

‘And why was that?'

Because they were truly terrible, Langham thought, but bit his tongue. ‘You tell me.'

He saw it coming. Pearson pointed at him with his free hand. ‘Because you, you self-serving, vindictive bastard, wrote a review of the second book so vile, so cutting, that the director of Wilkins hauled my editor over the coals and asked him how the novel came to be published by his company. And the upshot was that the third book was cancelled and I was out on my arse again.'

Langham leaned forward and said, ‘And I stand by every word of that review. It was a bad review because it was a bad book.'

Without warning Pearson raised the gun and fired.

What was so shocking about the gesture was that Pearson pulled the trigger in sudden, splenetic fury, and the bullet could have gone anywhere.

Langham felt a dull blow in his lower leg, not so much a pain as a sudden, intense ache, and when he looked down he saw blood soaking into the carpet beside his shoe.

He looked up. Pearson was shaking, holding the gun in both hands, aiming directly at Langham's chest.

‘The next one … the next one will be in your heart.'

Langham told himself that if he didn't move, if he kept very still, then the pain would remain at a tolerable level, a mere ache. He glanced down at his foot, surrounded now in a slick of dark blood, and he knew that if an artery had been hit in his lower leg he would die from blood loss in a matter of minutes.

‘I soldiered on over the next few years, as you do. I lived from one measly contract to the next, picking up work where I could. When I look back, I wonder how I managed to keep body and soul together.' He shrugged. ‘I put it down to dogged persistence, a belief in the worth of my work …'

Langham closed his eyes and tried not to laugh.

Pearson was saying, ‘And then six months ago Hubert and Shale decided to drop their line of westerns, and suddenly I had no more commissions, nothing more to write, and … and what would I do without my writing?'

Langham gritted his teeth against the mounting pain that pulsed up his leg. He stared across the room at Pearson. The man was crying now, weeping real tears as he lowered the gun to his lap.

The phone rang, startling him with the fact that there was an ordinary, sane world out there and that someone wished to speak to him. Instinctively he reached out and picked it up.

Pearson snapped, ‘Drop it, Langham!'

He dropped it, and the receiver clattered into the cradle.

Pearson nodded, licked his lips and resumed. ‘A few days after Hubert and Shale dropped me, I remembered your review. I dug it out and read it again, and that reminded me of all the others, and I unearthed Cartwright's hatchet job.' He smiled then, almost beatifically. ‘And it came to me, just as the plot of a mystery novel comes to me – a series of murders that would rid the city of vile and disreputable scum.'

‘You're mad,' Langham whispered to himself.

‘And as I mulled the idea over, more ideas came, neat twists and turns, worthy of my very best efforts. Why not, I thought, kill my tormentors by methods used by the murderers in my own books? How novel, how fitting … And I used another neat trick from one of my books. A dead man cannot commit murder, can he? So I found someone not dissimilar to myself, someone who would not be missed by family and friends, because he did not have family and friends – a homeless tramp I befriended and even gave my old clothes to. Then I got him blind drunk one night, drove down to Kent and arranged him on the London line with my papers in his pockets.'

He paused, smiling at Langham as if awaiting a round of applause.

Langham looked down at his foot. The pool of blood, he thought, appeared not to be getting any larger. Perhaps he'd been lucky and the bullet hadn't hit an artery.

‘Max Sidley was easy,' Pearson went on. ‘He hadn't heard about my “death”, and he let me into his house when I called with the news, spurious of course, about the sudden illness of one of his co-editors at Douglas and Dearing. He was a weak old thing and he put up no resistance when I dealt with him.'

Langham stared at Pearson. ‘With a drill …' he said.

Pearson smiled. ‘A method derived from one of my very best novels,
Death in the Night
.'

‘Sick,' Langham said.

Pearson waved this away and continued, ‘Gervaise Cartwright was an especial pleasure, Langham. I'd never liked the man's cruel little columns, even before he penned that poison review of my novel. I posed as an avid reader wanting him to sign one of his books, and he was only too willing to oblige. I slipped the stiletto into his back while he sat at his desk – and the hood was a little touch I thought might amuse those in the know.

‘I took great delight in planning the death of Charles Elder because he began it all, many years ago. He showed me hope, then withdrew it, and I always found him a conceited snob. You should have seen his face when I turned up at his country pile. He looked as if he'd seen a ghost – little Frankie Pearson, back from the dead. I must admit that he recovered from his shock and was the perfect host.'