Death of a Mystery Writer (15 page)

The first years of his working life (1932-1940) were spent in journalism, initially with the
Birmingham Post,
later on Fleet Street with the
Daily Clarion.
His politics at this time were the conventional blend of idealism and socialism, and his witty and trenchant reviews in the
Clarion
won him entry into the circle surrounding Auden and Isherwood. The war, however, led to a change of direction both in his career and in his politics. He served in North Africa and Italy, proving an effective if idiosyncratic soldier. In his spare time he wrote his first detective novel,
Murder by
Debrett,
and the publication of this in November 1945 marked the beginning of a series of highly entertaining stories, distinctive for their narrative pace and their mild and harmless snob appeal.

His politics, in contrast to those of many of his fellow soldiers, had moved sharply to the right. In 1947 he stood as Conservative candidate at a by-election in the Milton Grove constituency of Sheffield, but his personality proved ill-adapted to the democratic give-and-take of the hustings. In later years his pronouncements on political and social matters grew more and more extreme (a much quoted article for the
People
on the cult of the Angry Young Man was a case in point), but these were part of the elaborate public persona which Oliver Fairleigh (with the delighted cooperation of Fleet Street) built up over the years. By a series of
obiter dicta
and escapades he impressed himself on the public as a formidable upholder of Victorian attitudes, a country gentleman of the old school who had appointed himself the scourge of modernity in all its forms. The publicity he gained did no harm to the sales of the stream of works which poured from his pen, and at his death he was unquestionably the most popular writer of this kind of fiction in the English-speaking world.

Lacking the literary pretensions of a Sayers, or the ingenuity of a Christie, his stories are notable for their erratic high spirits and unfailing readability. Among the most accomplished, perhaps, are
Murder by Degrees,
with its unkind if entertaining picture of a Cambridge College,
Skirting Death,
the first of the Mrs. Merrydale books, and
Foul Play at the Crossroads,
in which to the conventional formula is added a spice of
Grand Guignol.

In 1949 Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs (as he had by then become, on the death of his father in 1946) married Eleanor, daughter of the Hon. Philip Erskine Howard. There were two sons and one daughter of the marriage, of which the elder son, Mark, succeeds to the baronetcy.

The obituary of Oliver Fairleigh spread over two columns extended nearly down to the middle of the page. Underneath (testifying to the change of values that had come over Printing
House Square in the later years of Oliver Fairleigh's life) were short obituaries of a Scottish bishop and a cabinet minister in the second Attlee government. In the center of the obituary was a photograph of Oliver Fairleigh. He stared out on the public at large, outraged, apoplectic, incredulous. Public folly, it seemed, had driven him to the verge of insanity. He looked like a Crimean War general whose men had deserted en masse, leaving him to face alone a regiment of galloping Cossacks. Not for the first time in his career, Meredith, sitting on the early morning train from Hadley to London, felt glad that the murder victim was indeed the victim, not one of the living suspects.

Turning to page two, he found a brief and neutrally worded announcement that the police were investigating the circumstances in which the novelist Oliver Fairleigh had died.

 • • • 

The offices of Macpherson's the publishers were in the West End of London—an area of parks and clubs, of royal palaces and exclusive hotels, of idiosyncratic shops which remained in existence against the logic and economics of the nineteen seventies. They were, in fact, in Oliver Fairleigh country.

The building was Queen Anne, and in spite of all the efforts of a modern construction company to halt the sinkings and slidings that time afflicts such buildings with, it was dark, irregular, and undeniably quaint. It had all the air of an old family firm, and was therefore much approved by Oliver Fairleigh; but in fact its origins (like his) were late nineteenth century and were based on the business acumen of its Scottish founder (a small printer of great thrift, industry, and intransigence). The firm had published a series of volumes of popular education which just matched the needs of the post-1870 generation of board-school products. Now they were a firm of great respectability and even greater prosperity. People in the trade laughed at their love of a bestseller—and silently ground their teeth at their skill in finding them.

Inspector Meredith arrived there by appointment at nine-thirty, and stood in the high room with the sagging ceiling which was its main office. Here a decorative young lady played with a
typewriter and met the general public, while a fearsome old dragon, face to the wall, did all the real work. Meredith sent his name up to Mr. Gerald Simmington, but when footsteps clattered down the echoing wooden stairway there were four feet to be distinguished. He realized as soon as the first man came into the room that he was being given the red carpet treatment. This could only be Sir Edwin Macpherson.

Sir Edwin was very large: not a fat, forceful man like Oliver Fairleigh, but a stupendously gross, flabby, hearty man, whose trousers were a great pinstriped chalice for holding paunch and buttocks in. It was miraculous how two little legs could hold up so much body. He was a man of multiple chins and bags under his eyes like chandeliers, a man of cigars and port-wine laugh, very jolly, hail-fellow, with a clear eye for the main chance and a quick profit. Gerald Simmington was a sandy-haired young man in his early thirties who kept, and seemed to belong, in the background.

Sir Edwin's demeanor on this occasion was an attempt at gravity—gravity mingled with discretion. The observer got the idea, though, that given the tiniest of openings, cheerfulness would break through.

“Sad business, Inspector, terribly sad business,” he said as he sighted the raincoated figure in the corner of the office and advanced with outstretched hand. “A great character, you know, a wonderfully vivid personality. A national figure, you might say. One of the old school, of course—nobody like him these days. We shall feel his loss here, you know—feel it deeply.” At these words Meredith noted the typing dragon in the corner half turn from contemplating the wall and eye disapprovingly the enormous back of her employer: her expression suggested she was calling down on him the wrath of God for his mendacity. “Anyway, thought I should come down and see you myself, before you talk to Gerald here. Assure you we want to do everything we can to help. Just ask, and the whole staff's at your beck and call. Appalling way for a man like him to go—monstrous, almost like a bad joke. He was our most popular author, you
know, by a long chalk. So if we can help you, we'll pull out all the stops, eh, Gerald?”

“Was Sir Oliver liked here?” asked Meredith conversationally (for it seemed that Sir Edwin's purpose in coming down was conversation, rather than making himself available for questions).

“Liked?” boomed the great voice, as if the question were so absurd as to release him from the need for gravity. “Liked? Good heavens no. He didn't want to be liked, Oliver Fairleigh. He wanted to be feared.” The great laugh rang out, echoing against the sagging ceiling. “And we were all scared stiff of him. I too! I most of all!” The laugh boomed out again, then stopped suddenly as Sir Edwin seemed to recollect the situation.

“He was in here last week, wasn't he?” asked Meredith.

“Yes. When was it, now?” A murmured prompt came from Simmington behind the bulwark of back. “That's right, Tuesday. We had lunch at the Savoy. Had to go along myself this time, because I'd skipped his last few visits here. Try and avoid them if I can—too embarrassing for a quiet chap like me. Still, he was in a frightfully good mood for him, wasn't he, Gerald? Didn't shout at the waiter till coffee came.”

“Do you know why he was in a good mood?”

“He'd been at the BBC during the morning, and thoroughly enjoyed himself.” Sir Edwin chuckled fruitily. “Been a naughty boy, as usual. That was always the way with old Oliver: if you could get him just after he'd done something outrageous, he could be as nice as pie.”

“I think I heard something about this BBC episode,” said Meredith. “There was a piece in one of the papers last week—in the gossip columns. Wasn't he insulting about other crime writers?”

“Something of the sort, I believe. Didn't specify, though: just mentioned senile hacks and so on. We've had trouble over that, I can assure you.” The great laugh rang out again. “You know our Golden Dagger series? Well, half the people who write for that seem to have heard about it and assumed it was an insult to them personally. Rum lot, writers. Told Gerald to tell them if they were
senile or were hacks, we wouldn't be publishing them. Hope they believed it. Everyone loves flattery, and when it comes to writers, you should lay it on with a trowel!”

“It's an interesting line of inquiry,” said Meredith, trying to respond in kind to Sir Edwin's merriment. “Perhaps one of them did it, out of revenge. Or perhaps there was a whole conspiracy of crime writers.”

This set Sir Edwin off. “A conspiracy of crime writers! You've quite a turn of phrase, Inspector! I can just imagine them all getting together to plan it! Sounds like a bad Hollywood film, eh?” He sobered up suddenly. “Mustn't joke. They're our authors. So was poor old Oliver, with all his faults. We'll miss his books once a year. We've lots better, but none as popular, eh, Gerald?” And he wagged a few chins in the direction of his shadow, and mentally contemplated his future sales figures.

“Well, I mustn't keep you,” he said finally, giving the impression he meant “you mustn't keep me.” “Gerald will take care of you. Come to us. Any hour of the day or night. Dreadful business, dreadful business.” At the door he paused, thoughtfully. “Publicity isn't doing us any harm, though,” he said, and marched away up the echoing stairs.

“Perhaps you'd like to come to my office,” murmured Gerald Simmington, sounding like a harp solo after a Sousa march. He led the way along a labyrinth of narrow corridors, strategically interspersed with steps to trip or tumble. Finally they arrived at a little room, neatly stacked with books and files, with a dirty window overlooking the arid well that was the area, and a desk of exemplary tidiness.

“I find if I don't keep it in apple-pie order I'm overwhelmed with paper in a matter of hours,” said Gerald Simmington, as if some explanation were demanded. He gestured Meredith to a chair, and sat down himself. His elbows, apart, rested on the desk, but his long fingers came delicately together under his chin, as if he were trying to make himself into a neat geometrical pattern. “As you know,” he said in his courteous, neutral voice, “we've published all the Oliver Fairleigh books here, so
over the years we've certainly got to know his—little ways, shall we say? I'm not sure how else we can help you, but perhaps you'd better tell me that.”

He blinked rather formally behind his heavy spectacles. A born second-in-command, thought Meredith.

“I wanted to ask you,” he said, “about your dinner with Sir Oliver the Sunday before last.”

“Oh, yes. It was my first real visit there, you know. He knew I was in the area, and asked me to dinner. I was apprehensive, of course, but it went off very nicely. I gather he'd been out to lunch and made everybody grovel, and—as Sir Edwin suggested a moment ago—that did tend to put him in a good humor for the rest of the day. We discussed the new book,
Murder Upstairs and Downstairs.
He was very late with it, but we here had decided to hurry it through and get it out by early October.”

“What I was really interested in,” said Meredith, “was the drinks: did you have liqueurs with coffee after dinner?”

“Yes, we did. Just Sir Oliver and I—Lady Fairleigh said she was tired. We went into the study.”

“Did Sir Oliver drink lakka?”

“Yes, he did. Was it—?”

“Yes, it was.”

Mr. Simmington's colorless face lost some of its minor civil servant's anonymity, and seemed to evince a spark of interest. “Well, well,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I've been editing the Golden Dagger series for four years, and this is the first time I've encountered a real murder.” It didn't seem to upset him.

“When you went into the study, was the cabinet with the liqueurs in it already unlocked?”

“No, Sir Oliver unlocked it himself.”

“And afterward?”

“He locked it himself as I got up to leave. He was very particular about it, and I noticed it specially.”

“Why did you notice it?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I'd heard rumors about his son, and I wondered whether that was the reason.”

“I see,” said Meredith. He grinned. “You make it very difficult.”

“I'm sorry? Why is that?”

“I'm trying to establish
when
the decanter could have been tampered with. It could have been done immediately before Sir Oliver drank, in which case my list of suspects is everybody who was in the room, except one.”

“One?”

“Mark, the elder son, was too drunk. Out like a light as far as I can see, and nobody even hints he could have got up and sneaked over. On the other hand, to do it then would be extremely risky: it would need nerves of iron. The alternative is, it could have been done before—which would significantly widen our list of suspects. The problem is how anyone could have got hold of the keys.”

“You mean Sir Oliver kept them with him the whole time?”

“That seems to be the general testimony. That would make it very difficult, almost impossible, except that he sometimes gave them to Surtees, his man, which opens up certain possibilities. What I'm wondering about at the moment is whether Sir Oliver was really as careful as people make out, and I was hoping that, for example, he might have left the cabinet open while he saw you out.”