Death of a Salesperson (8 page)

‘I have a room booked for the night.'

‘Yes, madam: what name?'

‘Mrs Jeremy Fortescue.'

‘Oh, yes, of course, madam. It's 509. I have another key, just in case. Here we are. I do hope you'll find everything to your satisfaction, madam.'

Janice was hardly listening. She took the key, marched to the lift, and pressed the button for the fifth floor. How nice to be away for a time, and on one's own. Springy of step, she marched down the corridor and opened the door of 509.

‘Hel-lo. What can I do for you?'

Janice had met her destiny, had had the encounter which her years of petty deceptions had been leading up to. Room 509 was in fact a most splendid suite, and he was standing by the door to the bathroom, glass in hand, close brown curly hair grown long over the collar, and dazzling white
shirt open to the navel in a style that by now must have been second nature to him, so that to do up a few buttons would have seemed like being overdressed.

‘Or could it be what would you care to do for me?' he added, with a dangerous yet somehow nervous smile.

‘Oh dear—how silly.
Awfully
sorry. I must have got the wrong room,' said Janice, pink with embarrassment, backing away, and screwing her head round to look at the door.

‘Hotel keys don't usually open more than one room,' Jeremy Fortescue pointed out. ‘What number is your key?'

‘Five-oh-nine. Look, there
must
be some mistake—'

‘Must be. But why rush to correct it? You haven't told me your name.'

‘Janice. Janice Fortescue.'

‘Well, there you are.'

‘Yes. I'm afraid so.'

‘They thought you were my wife.'

‘Yes.'

‘At least you recognize me. That's half the battle. Now what will you have to drink?'

‘No, really. I ought to tell them—'

‘All the time in the world. Now what will it be? Gin and tonic? Vodka and lime?'

By this time he was very close to her. Closer than she would have liked. Or, to put it more accurately, too close for comfort. It was, really, a very exciting body: the shoulders certainly were broad, the chest wonderfully hairy, and the whole splendidly brown for an English April. And if his manner was the cheap seducer's (she told herself determinedly, though in fact she had known very few cheap seducers), still it was tense, nervous—almost neurotic in its intensity, which made her think of herself as a
need
, rather than as a victim. His face, close to, was haggard, the eyes almost rimmed. His hands were not exactly shaking, yet they were not still either—that might be incipient alcoholism, of
course, but there was little alcohol on his breath. He behaved like a man who had just been through a shattering experience, or perhaps was just anticipating one. It was all, altogether, wonderfully . . . exciting.

‘Perhaps just a small sherry,' Janice said.

Quite a while later, when Janice had not yet fallen, but was quite determined that she would fall (they were sprawled across the mock Louis Seize sofa, and she was speaking into more chest hair than she would have believed possible), she said:

‘I have a confession to make.'

‘Don't bother. This isn't the first time that's been done to me, don't you worry. However you fixed it, it was Lady Luck pulled the strings. You are but
exactly
my type. The fair hair, the snub nose—just what I always go for.'

‘I did
not
fix it! That's a disgraceful suggestion!' Janice was as indignant about the crumby ‘Lady Luck' line as about the suggestion. ‘If you thought that surprise as I came in was acting, then you must be beyond recognizing genuine emotions. But I did say to reception that I was Mrs Jeremy Fortescue. I find it gets me better service. Besides, it
is
my real name.'

‘It's not mine.'

‘But of course it is. That's why I—'

‘Do you know how I got it?'

He had pulled himself almost upright, and he sat over her, looking straight at her, and still speaking with that nervous intensity which she found so exciting and disturbing. It's that nervousness that gives him his appeal, his irresistibility, she said to herself. It's almost as if he had never . . .

‘I was sixteen,' he said, in dark, reminiscent mood. ‘Sixteen, going on seventeen. I'd just been expelled from my third school. Portlington. You had to be really appalling to be expelled from Portlington. I was the first since the First World War. Those were the days when girls still had
unwanted pregnancies, of course. Now it would have been easily arranged. Anyway, I was desperate to go on the stage, or into films, or failing that, join the army or the Foreign Legion, or whatever. And my father took me to this provincial dump, not far from here, actually . . . what was the name? Bridgehead, that's it . . . he took me to Bridgehead, and he dragged me along to this school—the Drake School, Bridgehead, and a scummy little dump it was, and how they had the cheek to charge fees I don't know. Anyway, we were shown around, and given prospectuses, and a copy of the school magazine, and when we got back to the hotel my father said this was my last chance, but I was damned well going to work my guts out to make a go of it, or he'd want to know the reason why. He had the idea I ought to go to university. He was a very dim man, my father. Anyway, after dinner my father went down to the bar for a drink, and I was leafing through this damned school magazine, and I saw “Jeremy Fortescue—junior essay prize and under-15s hurdling cup”—'

Jeremy! Poor Jeremy! thought Janice, remembering the gold-stamped copy of
Hereward the Wake
, and the tiny silver-plated cup that was already showing the copper underneath the plate.

‘—and I thought: that's a hell of a good name for an actor. It had an upper-class ring about it, but it left open the possibility of devilment. And I packed my things, hitchhiked as far from Bridgehead as I could get, and eventually got taken on as ASM at a tiny rep theatre in Rotherham, run by a formidable lady who took a fancy to me. That was the beginning of it all . . .'

‘Fascinating,' said Janice, as she felt his hand return to her shoulder. The hand, she noticed, was not quite still, but yet it showed a practised confidence, as well it might. Soon she was far beyond noticing whether it was still or not.

Some hours later, when the hotel was quiet, in the middle of a very dark night, Janice, more satisfied than she would
have believed possible, heard Jeremy breathe in her ear: ‘I always do it as if it were the last time.' Janice giggled and said:

‘Do you know what my mother calls you?'

‘I can imagine.'

‘A fornicator, a child-molester and a drunkard.'

‘She was fourteen, but she looked twenty-one,' said Jeremy Fortescue. ‘Anyway, she did when I'd finished with her.'

‘I notice you don't deny the rest.'

‘How could I?' he asked, his breath now strong with whisky, and very close.

In the morning he insisted they have breakfast in his suite. When the waiter from the Prince Frederick dining-room brought it in, Janice was in the bathroom showering, but Jeremy shouted:

‘Breakfast up, darling. But don't hurry.'

And Janice replied: ‘Won't be a minute.'

They ate companionably, Jeremy seeming not to have eaten for hours. When they left, Jeremy brought the car round, and paid his bill with a credit card. He fetched Janice, and they sailed together through the foyer—how
lucky
she had had with her that enormous hat! she could not have looked anyone in the face—and then out into the car. He dropped her at the station, and behind the car's smoked windscreen they kissed goodbye. Jeremy got out of the car as Janice disappeared through the arch into the darkness of the station, and waved and called goodbye. On-the station forecourt he created a small sensation, and signed a few autographs.

Once inside the station, Janice telephoned to the chairman of the meeting (‘I've suddenly got this
appalling
headache'), and then took the next train home. Jeremy tore himself away from his little knot of fans, and drove straight to Markham studios, where he was due to begin work on an American adaptation of
The Last Days of Pompeii.
He
looked marvellous in a toga, and he struck up an immediate rapport with the actress playing Nydia. From that first day they were inseparable, and the rest of the unit commented on it. ‘Jeremy usually plays it so casual,' said one of those who'd worked with him before. ‘Like he was one of nature's loners. Not this time.' One or two of them who were really friends of his added: ‘Perhaps she's the one who'll finally get him away from that bitch.' The remark got around the studio, and was taken up even by those who did not know Jeremy Fortescue's wife. They were saying it when her body was found, six days later.

• • •

When the policeman came to the Prince Frederick, the clerk at Reception had been expecting him for some time, and was quite twittery with excitement. He had read of the death of Mrs Jeremy Fortescue in the papers, naturally, and had begun to think of himself as one of the last to see the dead woman alive. He even had a bookmark in the register, to show the Inspector where Jeremy Fortescue had signed in.

‘But it's Mrs Fortescue we're interested in,' said the Inspector. ‘You're quite sure she was with him?'

‘Not with him. She came later. But I saw her—oh, definitely I saw her. I was on the desk here when she arrived.'

‘She didn't sign the register?'

‘Of course not. Her husband had already signed.'

‘You've seen pictures of Mrs Fortescue?'

‘Oh yes. In the newspapers. They weren't
good
, but I recognized them: the hair, that nose. Of course, I saw her only briefly, and one of the things that
is
impressed on us here is that we mustn't
stare
at the clientele: now and again someone may be with someone who—how shall I put it? he isn't legally married to. But that was Mrs Fortescue all right.' He permitted himself the vulgarity of leaning over the desk and asking breathlessly: ‘Why?'

The Inspector was forthcoming. The newspapers that morning had mostly got the story right anyway, so there could be no harm in confirming them.

‘Well, as you know—as everybody knows—she was murdered. Very possibly by a sex-maniac—we don't rule that out. Perhaps some casual pick-up. Perhaps by one or other of her regular boyfriends. She was by all accounts a very fascinating woman.'

A faint shadow of doubt wafted through the clerk's mind: the lady had not struck
him
as a very fascinating woman. But the doubt never got to his face, and the Inspector went on:

‘That's why we have to eliminate the husband. There are some things about the death that make it look like a sudden fit of passion, in other words a quite unpremeditated murder. Fortescue and his wife had led a cat and dog existence for some time. The marriage was on, it was off—you know the kind of thing. People in the acting world seem to have different standards of morality in most respects. She'd certainly had plenty of affairs—'

‘Not to mention him—'

‘Precisely. But she kept, apparently, drawing him back. Or so his friends say. Expressing indifference about his affairs, but tormenting him about her own. Now, as you know, I imagine, the body was found buried in a coppice on Bromlet Heath, but it had been taken there, so we think. We can't be exact about the time of death, but the pathologist is pretty definite that he wouldn't expect it to be more than six days dead when it was found. And he'd say it in court. That puts her death, at the earliest, some time on Wednesday of last week. The lady, by the way, was renting a cottage twenty miles from here—rather remote, and nobody saw any comings or goings, and she had no contact to speak of with any of the neighbours.'

‘A loner too?'

‘Well, no. But not neighbourly. That explains why she
could have disappeared for several days without anybody noticing. Jeremy Fortescue says he wasn't expected at the cottage, and he didn't go there, and we have no evidence to contradict him. Says he isn't the cottage type, but the hotel type. His lifestyle would seem to bear
that
out. Now, the problem is that Wednesday, which is a sort of outer limit, according to the pathologist. She couldn't have been killed earlier than that. But if you say she spent Wednesday night here—'

‘Oh, she did. Spent the night. Breakfast in their rooms. Went through this foyer. There's people in town—I've heard them talking in the bar—saw him seeing her off at the station.'

‘Exactly. That's what we heard. And what he told us. Said he'd no idea where his wife was going. Said she was “her own woman”. Well that would be Thursday morning. And since then Jeremy Fortescue has been absolutely tied up. Filming twelve or fifteen hours a day, and—well, let's call it vouched for at night. Markham Studios are a good thirty miles from Bromlet Heath, so to murder her, take her body there, and bury it, he'd need a good deal of time unvouched for, and he just hasn't got it. When they're working intensively on a film they're hardly alone for a minute, and he's been working—or whatever—practically non-stop.'

‘I see.'

‘For him to have done it, it would have to have been on the Wednesday.'

‘Then really, it doesn't look as if it could have been him, does it, Inspector? And I must say, while he was here, he always behaved like a
perfect
gentleman.'

‘Yes, clearly we're going to have to look elsewhere,' said the Inspector, with a shade of regret in his voice, for a domestic murder was always straightforward, whereas sex maniacs were the very devil to bring down.

• • •

Over the years, Janice Fortescue put the other Jeremy out of her mind, though it was difficult. Very difficult at first. All the time she was expecting something to blow her world apart. It quite put her off her tennis. When the news broke of Veronica Fortescue's death she was hour by hour expecting a visit from the police. Only when weeks went by and they hadn't come did she begin to gain a sense of renewed security. Only then could she bear to read the accounts of the case which she had stored up (‘Your namesake, darling,' she had explained to her Jeremy), and to order in her mind what must have happened.