Unnatural Causes (4 page)

“How can you be sure?” It was hardly a necessary question. There are few things more difficult to disguise than typing and the girl had surely copied enough Maurice Seton manuscripts to recognise his style.

But before she had a chance to reply, Miss Calthrop said: “I think it would be best if I just read part of it.” They waited while she took from her handbag a pair of immense jewelled spectacles, settled them on her nose and arranged herself more comfortably in the chair. Maurice Seton, thought Dalgliesh, was about to have his first public reading. He would have been gratified by the listeners’ rapt attention and possibly, too, by Miss Calthrop’s histrionics.

Celia, faced with the work of a fellow craftsman and sure of the audience, was prepared to give of her best. She read: “Carruthers pushed aside the bead curtain and entered the nightclub. For a moment he stood motionless in the doorway, his tall figure elegant as always in the well-cut dinner jacket, his cool, ironic eyes surveying with a kind of disdain the close-packed tables, the squalid pseudo-Spanish decor, the shabby clientèle. So this was the headquarters of perhaps the most dangerous gang in Europe! Behind this sordid but commonplace nightclub, outwardly no different from a hundred others in Soho, was a mastermind who could control some of the most powerful criminal gangs in the West. It seemed unlikely. But then, this whole fantastic adventure was unlikely. He sat down at the table nearest the door to watch and wait. When the waiter came he ordered fried scampi, green salad and a bottle of
Chianti. The man, a grubby little Cypriot, took his order without a word. Did they know he was here? Carruthers wondered. And, if they did, how long would it be before they showed themselves?

“There was a small stage at the end of the club furnished only with a cane screen and a single red chair. Suddenly the lights were dimmed and the pianist began to play a slow, sensuous tune. From behind the screen came a girl. She was blond and beautiful, not young but mature and full bosomed, with a grace and arrogance which Carruthers thought might indicate White Russian blood. She moved forward sensuously to the single chair and with great deliberation began to unzip her evening dress. It fell about her knees to the ground. Underneath she wore nothing but a black brassière and G-string. Sitting now with her back to the audience she twisted her hands to unhook the brassière. Immediately from the crowded tables there came a hoarse murmuring. ‘Rosie! Rosie! Come on, Rosie! Give! Give!’”

Miss Calthrop stopped reading. There was complete silence. Most of her listeners seemed stunned. Then Bryce called out: “Well, go on, Celia! Don’t stop now that it’s getting really exciting. Does Rosie fall on the Hon. Martin Carruthers and rape him? He’s had it coming to him for years. Or is that too much to hope?”

Miss Calthrop said: “There’s no need to go on. The proof we need is there.”

Sylvia Kedge turned again to Dalgliesh. “Mr. Seton would never call a character Rosie, Mr. Dalgliesh. That was his mother’s name. He told me once that he would never use it in any of his books. And he never did.”

“Particularly not for a Soho prostitute,” broke in Miss Calthrop. “He talked to me about his mother quite often. He adored her. Absolutely adored her. It nearly broke his heart when she died and his father married again.” Miss Calthrop’s voice throbbed with all the yearning of frustrated motherhood.

Suddenly Oliver Latham said: “Let me see that.”

Celia handed the manuscript to him and they all watched with anxious expectancy while he scanned it. Then he handed it back without a word.

“Well?” asked Miss Calthrop. “Nothing. I just wanted to have a look at it. I know Seton’s handwriting but not his typing. But you say that he didn’t type this.”

“I’m sure he didn’t,” said Miss Kedge. “Although I can’t exactly say why. It just doesn’t look like his work. But it was typed on his machine.”

“What about the style?” asked Dalgliesh.

The little group considered. At last Bryce said: “One couldn’t really call that typical Seton. After all, the man could write when he chose. It’s almost artificial, isn’t it? One gets the impression he was trying to write badly.”

Elizabeth Marley had been silent until now, sitting alone in the corner like a discontented child who has been dragged unwillingly into the company of boring adults. Suddenly she said impatiently: “If this is a fake it’s obvious we were meant to discover it. Justin’s right. The style’s completely bogus. And it’s too much of a coincidence that the person responsible should have hit on the one name which would arouse suspicion. Why choose Rosie? If you ask me, this is just Maurice Seton trying to be clever and you’ve all fallen for it. You’ll read all about it when his new book comes out. You know how he loves experimenting.”

“It’s certainly the sort of childish scheme that Seton might think up,” said Latham. “I’m not sure I want to be an involuntary participant in any of his damn silly experiments. I suggest we forget the whole thing. He’ll turn up in his own time.”

“Maurice was always very odd and secretive, of course,” agreed Miss Calthrop. “Especially about his work. And there’s another thing. I’ve been able to give him one or two useful
little hints in the past. He’s definitely used them. But never a word to me subsequently. Naturally I didn’t expect a formal acknowledgement. If I can help a fellow writer I’m only too happy. But it’s a little disconcerting when a book is published to find one or two of one’s own ideas in the plot and never a thank you from Maurice.”

“He’s probably forgotten by then that he didn’t think them out for himself,” suggested Latham with a kind of tolerant contempt.

“He never forgot anything, Oliver. Maurice had a very clear mind. He worked methodically too. If I dropped a suggestion he’d pretend to be only half interested and mutter something about trying to work it in sometime or other. But I could see from the look in his eyes that he’d seized on it and was only waiting to get home to file it away on one of those little index cards. Not that I resented it really. It’s just that I think he might have acknowledged the help occasionally. I gave him an idea a month or so ago and I bet you anything it will appear in the next book.”

No one accepted the offer. Bryce said: “You’re absolutely right about him, Celia. One contributed one’s own mite from time to time. God knows why except that one does get the occasional idea for a new method of murder and it seemed a shame to waste it when poor Seton was so obviously near the end of his resources. But, apart from that predatory gleam in his eye—not a sign of appreciation, my dears! Of course, for reasons you all appreciate, he gets no help from me now. Not after what he did to Arabella.”

Miss Calthrop said: “Oh, my idea wasn’t for a new method of murder exactly. It was just a situation. I thought it might make rather an effective opening chapter. I kept telling Maurice that you must capture your readers from the very
start. I pictured a body drifting out to sea in a dinghy with its hands chopped off at the wrists.”

There was a silence, so complete, so sudden that the striking of the carriage clock drew all their eyes towards it as if it were chiming the hour of execution. Dalgliesh was looking at Latham. He had stiffened in his chair and was grasping the stem of his glass with such force that Dalgliesh half-expected it to snap. It was impossible to guess what lay behind that pale, rigid mask. Suddenly Bryce gave his high, nervous laugh and the tension broke. One could almost hear the little gasps of relief.

“What an extraordinarily morbid imagination you have, Celia! One would never suspect. You must control these impulses, my dear, or the League of Romantic Novelists will hurl you out of the club.”

Latham spoke, his voice controlled, colourless. He said: “All this doesn’t help with the present problem. Do I take it that we’re agreed to take no action about Seton’s disappearance? Eliza is probably right and it’s just some nonsense Maurice has thought up. If so the sooner we leave Mr. Dalgliesh to enjoy his holiday in peace the better.”

He was rising to go as if suddenly wearied of the whole subject when there was a loud authoritative knock on the cottage door. Jane Dalgliesh lifted an interrogative eyebrow at her nephew then got up silently and went through the porch to open it. The party fell silent, listening unashamedly. A caller after dusk was rare in their isolated community. Once night fell they were used to seeing only each other and knew by instinct of long experience whose footstep was approaching their door. But this loud summons had been the knock of a stranger. There was the soft, broken mutter of voices from the porch. Then Miss Dalgliesh reappeared in the doorway, two raincoated men in the shadows behind her. She said: “This is
Detective Inspector Reckless and Sergeant Courtney from the County CID. They are looking for Digby Seton. His sailing dinghy has come ashore at Cod Head.”

Justin Bryce said: “That’s odd. It was beached as usual at the bottom of Tanner’s Lane at five o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

Everyone seemed to realise simultaneously how strange it was that a Detective Inspector and a Sergeant should be calling after dark about a missing dinghy but Latham spoke before the others had formed their questions: “What’s wrong, Inspector?”

Jane Dalgliesh replied for him. “Something very shocking, I’m afraid. Maurice Seton’s body was in the boat.”

“Maurice’s body! Maurice? But that’s ridiculous!” Miss Calthrop’s sharp didactic voice cut across the room in futile protest. “It can’t be Maurice. He never takes the boat out. Maurice doesn’t like sailing.”

The Inspector moved forward into the light and spoke for the first time.

“He hadn’t been sailing, Madam. Mr. Seton was lying dead in the bottom of the boat. Dead, and with both hands taken off at the wrists.”

Celia Calthrop, as if relishing her own obstinacy, said for the tenth time: “I keep telling you! I didn’t say a word about the plot to anyone except Maurice. Why should I? And it’s no good harping on about the date. It was about six months ago—perhaps longer. I can’t remember just when. But we were walking along the beach to Walberswick and I suddenly thought that it would make a good start to a detective story if one described a handless corpse drifting out to sea in a boat. So I suggested it to Maurice. I certainly never mentioned it to anyone else until tonight. Maurice may have done so, of course.”

Elizabeth Marley burst out irritably: “Obviously he told someone! We can hardly suppose that he cut his own hands off in the cause of verisimilitude. And it’s stretching coincidence too far to suggest that you and the murderer happened to think of the same idea. But I don’t see how you can be so certain that you didn’t talk about it to anyone else. I believe you mentioned it to me once when we were discussing how slow Maurice was to get his plots under way.”

No one looked as if they believed her. Justin Bryce said softly, but not so softly that the others couldn’t hear: “Dear Eliza! So loyal always.”

Oliver Latham laughed and there was a short, embarrassed silence broken by Sylvia Kedge’s hoarse, belligerent voice. “He never mentioned it to me.”

“No dear,” replied Miss Calthrop sweetly. “But then, there were a great many things which Mr. Seton didn’t discuss with you. One doesn’t tell everything to one’s maid. And that, my dear, was how he thought of you. You should have had more pride than to let him use you as a household drudge. Men prefer a little spirit, you know.”

It was gratuitously spiteful and Dalgliesh could sense the general embarrassed surprise. But no one spoke. He was almost ashamed to look at the girl but she had bent her head as if meekly accepting a merited rebuke, and the two black swathes of hair had swung forward to curtain her face. In the sudden silence he could hear the rasping of her breath, and he wished he could feel sorry for her. Certainly Celia Calthrop was intolerable; but there was something about Sylvia Kedge which provoked unkindness. He wondered what lay behind that particular impulse to savagery.

It was nearly an hour since Inspector Reckless and his Sergeant had arrived, an hour in which the Inspector had said little and the rest of the company, except Dalgliesh and his aunt, had said a great deal. Not all of it had been wise. Reckless had settled himself on arrival in a high chair against the wall and sat there still, solid as a bailiff, his sombre eyes watchful in the light of the fire. Despite the warmth of the room he was wearing his raincoat, a grubby gaberdine which looked too fragile to sustain the weight of its armour of metal buttons, buckles and studs. On his lap he nursed with careful hands
a pair of immense gauntlet gloves and a trilby hat as if fearful that someone was going to snatch them from him. He looked like an interloper; the minor official there on sufferance, the little man who dares not risk a drink on duty. And that, thought Dalgliesh, was exactly the effect he aimed to produce. Like all successful detectives, he was able to subdue his personality at will so that even his physical presence became as innocuous and commonplace as a piece of furniture. The man was helped by his appearance, of course. He was small—surely only just the regulation height for a policeman—and the sallow, anxious face was as neutral and unremarkable as any of a million faces seen crowding into a football ground on a Saturday afternoon. His voice, too, was flat, classless, giving no clue to the man. His eyes, wide-spaced and deep-set under jutting brows, had a trick of moving expressionlessly from face to face as people spoke, which the present company might have found disconcerting if they had bothered to notice. By his side, Sergeant Courtney sat with the air of one who has been told to sit upright, keep his eyes and ears open and say nothing, and who is doing just that.

Dalgliesh glanced across the room to where his aunt sat in her usual chair. She had taken up her knitting and seemed serenely detached from the business in hand. She had been taught to knit by a German governess and held the needles upright in the Continental manner; Celia Calthrop seemed mesmerised by their flashing tips and sat glaring across at them as if both fascinated and affronted by her hostess’s unusual expertise. She was less at ease, crossing and uncrossing her feet and jerking back her head from the fire as if she found its heat intolerable. It was certainly getting hot in the sitting room. All the other visitors, except Reckless, seemed to feel it too. Oliver Latham was pacing up and down, his brow
wet with sweat, his restless energy seeming to raise the temperature still higher. Suddenly he swung round at Reckless: “When did he die?” he demanded. “Come on, let’s have some facts for a change! When did Seton die?”