Frequent Hearses (25 page)

In England my talent was recognised, and I prospered; it was for Madeline’s sake that I worked and saved, and there wasn’t a day when I didn’t think of her. Sometimes I got news of her from friends in South Africa who knew how I felt, but I never mentioned her to anyone in England, and I doubt if anyone in England knew that I’d ever been married; somehow it wasn’t a thing I wanted to talk about. I brooded a lot, no doubt, and worried a lot, and it’s arguable that on this topic I got to be a bit unhinged. But in a fragmentary way I was kept informed about Madeline, and what I wasn’t told I could visualise or imagine. I was sent an occasional photograph, too…

And that was how I was able to recognise my daughter at Nicholas Crane’s party.

I’d heard that Dorothy and Madeline were leaving for England—that Dorothy had developed cancer of the lungs and wanted advice from Harley Street. And I’d tried to trace them after their arrival in England, and completely failed. That meant that for two nightmarish years I’d had no news of them whatever, and didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. I’d intended attempting to make it up with Dorothy, so that I could see Madeline again, but both of them seemed to have just stepped off the ship and vanished into thin air. I suspect now that the detective agency I employed was grossly incompetent.

I was sounding the ultimate depths of human misery when Leiper asked me to write the script for
The Unfortunate Lady.
My first instinct was to refuse—all work was an atrocious penance at that stage—but then I decided that a new kind of job might alleviate my depression slightly, and eventually I accepted. I’d not the faintest notion, of course, that Madeline was in the film business, and though I heard ‘Gloria Scott’ referred to once or twice, the name naturally conveyed nothing to me; and as her part in the film wasn’t important enough to justify her attending our script conferences, there was no opportunity for me to meet her.

But then came the night of Nicholas Crane’s party.

I was talking to someone when she came in, and didn’t immediately see her. But when I did, I recognised her instantly; and I think that if I hadn’t already had a good deal to drink I’d have made something of a scene. As it was, I could hardly believe I wasn’t dreaming.

And she recognised me, of course. Caroline Cecil told your Inspector Humbleby that as soon as Madeline entered something startled her; and that something was the unexpected sight of me. She knew who her father was, and my photograph has appeared on the dust jackets of various of my books; but apparently she’d had no idea, till that moment, that I had anything to do with films in general or
The Unfortunate Lady
in particular. So seeing me there was a shock.

We were introduced. We spoke to one another like strangers. She wasn’t sure that I’d identified her and I wasn’t sure that she’d identified me, and I think we both felt that a rowdy party wasn’t the place for a reunion like ours. I was dazed, too. It was like inventing an island or a continent and then discovering that in all its imagined detail it actually existed. The party dragged on and I drank a lot more. Madeline stayed behind to talk to Nicholas Crane and I went out to wait for her on the pavement. One or two others, as it happened, waited with me.

It’s odd how one’s mind works. I’d been assuming that because I wanted so passionately to be with Madeline, she’d want to be with me. But she didn’t, of course. I’d been out of her life for so long that I was nothing but a name to her—and God knows what lies Dorothy had told her about me. Anyway, she’d been on her own in England for two years and yet had never made any attempt to get into touch with me… She would have done, perhaps, if she’d ever been utterly wretched, but until Mr. Nicholas Crane came along she’d escaped that.

And in the end it was to me that she turned for comfort. As we walked to Piccadilly that night, the whole story poured out: how she’d grown up to detest Dorothy; how Dorothy had died in their Liverpool hotel the night after they landed and how, being still only seventeen and thinking that a particularly odious brother of Dorothy’s would now be appointed as her guardian, she had run away to Menenford that same night, without telling anyone of Dorothy’s death, and had there taken a job at the repertory theatre under an assumed name. She was afraid, it seems, that the police would find her, but there was no photograph of her in Dorothy’s luggage, and although the Missing Persons Bureau got one from South Africa, she was never located. The ration-book difficulty she solved by eating in cafes. That was how she began a completely new life…

She was distraught that night in Mayfair, almost hysterical. Small wonder. In addition to all the other things, she told me what Maurice and Madge and Nicholas Crane had done to her.

You can guess how I felt. As for her, her one thought was to run home and hide her head under the bedclothes. I consoled her as well as I could, and after arranging to call for her at her new lodgings in the morning to talk things over, I put her into her taxi. She wasn’t in the mood for company, even mine.

Naturally I lied about this episode to the police. By that time, Maurice Crane was dead, and I could hardly admit that I was Gloria Scott’s father.

I stood in Piccadilly for a few minutes after the taxi had gone, fretting. It had occurred to me, rather belatedly, that Madeline’s mood was such that she really ought not to be left alone. So after a while I hailed a second taxi and told the man to drive me to the Stamford Street address.

And by the time we reached Waterloo Bridge they were just pulling my daughter out of the river.

I noticed the little crowd that had gathered, and I told the driver to stop. Somehow I had a premonition of what had happened. I stayed there only long enough to make sure I was right. Then the taxi took me back to my hotel.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I was a little mad, I expect. There were two lines of Pope’s Elegy which chased one another interminably round the inside of my skull.
‘On all the line a sudden vengeance waits, And frequent hearses shall besiege your gates…’

There was only one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kill.

And there were three people whom I thought the world would be well rid of.

As you know, colchicine was what I used, and it was a more or less arbitrary choice. I was limited to the vegetable poisons, of course—I’ve never been able to understand why murderers insist on buying packets of arsenic at the chemist’s when the fields and woods and gardens are smothered in things that are quite as deadly—but it might just as well have been aconitine or belladonna. Perhaps I was influenced by the fact that to me the autumn crocus is one of the most beautiful of flowers… I hadn’t the resources—chloroform and what not—for isolating the pure principle of the drug. But my amateurish distilling turned out quite well—didn’t it? And if it had failed to work, I could always have employed some other method.

The distilling was done immediately before lunch on the Friday. Earlier that morning I had been to Stamford Street to remove any evidence there might be there of Madeline’s real name. In case you should think me stupid—which most certainly I am not—I must emphasise that this was never intended to be anything more than a delaying tactic; I knew that my daughter’s true identity was bound to be established in the end. But as a delaying tactic it was useful, for I could not at that stage foresee what opportunities I should have for getting at my victims, and I needed a few days’ immunity in which to work.

A few days, I say; the point is that I intended quite honestly to give myself up as soon as the job was done. Does that surprise you? Probably not. You must have perceived that X’s recklessness—in the matter of leaving footprints, for instance—could only be explained, in a person who in other respects was so obviously intelligent (for example, I invariably wore gloves), by some such hypothesis as that. In the end, however, the habit of being alive proved too strong for me. It was not lack of courage which prevented me from surrendering myself; it was the intellectual conviction that such an act would be socially valueless, and hence merely irrational and superstitious.

When I was at Stamford Street I took the opportunity of removing, for sentimental reasons, one or two mementoes of Madeline. I have them with me here—but it’s strange how little they move me now.

I poisoned Maurice Crane’s medicine that Friday afternoon. The grounds of Lanthorn House provide perfect cover, and I was spying out the land when I happened to glimpse him at his bedroom window. So that enabled me to find the right room without too much difficulty. The house is large, rambling and completely vulnerable, and it was simple to get in. To roam about it uninvited, with a tincture of colchicine in my pocket, was of course tremendously risky, but I have never been averse from danger, and the gods protect those who act boldly. Certainly they protected me, then and throughout. At Stamford Street, at Lanthorn House, on Doon Island, at Nicholas Crane’s London flat—on each and every occasion I escaped undetected. A guardian angel—or devil, as some will be sure to say!—looked after me, and my confidence increased hugely as success followed success.

I went home and waited for what should happen. You know how things turned out. Maurice Crane did die, and in front of my very eyes. And that was when, quite suddenly and without warning, Madeline ceased to be important to me. I must not say too much on this subject, or stupid people will misconstrue me. But I can tell you this, that at the moment of Maurice Crane’s death my love for Madeline was blotted out, or thrust aside, by an even stronger emotion. Till then, I had not believed that any stronger emotion could possibly exist. But I was wrong. What I felt then was the strongest and deepest and most intoxicating of all the emotions—and I’ve wondered since how on earth I managed to conceal it! However, I’m an excellent actor, and manage I somehow did.

Nicholas Crane was the next on my list, and until early on the Monday no opportunity of dealing with him presented itself. But after that the Fates were kind. I visited his flat at half-past seven that morning on a fictitious pretext. Not a very plausible hour for visiting! But I was devouringly impatient and scarcely cared whether he found my irruption suspicious or not. My excuse for knocking him up was to have been that I was leaving London early for the North, and wanted before I went to consult him about certain technical details—camera-angles, panning and so forth—in my script. He might or might not have believed that; and an opportunity for leaving some poison behind might or might not have occurred. But in the event, such considerations turned out to be irrelevant. By a blessed coincidence he had gone out, inadvertently leaving his door unlatched. So I was able to do what I pleased.

That afternoon I drove down to Doon Island. There I was obliged to wait an hour or two before it was possible to enter Madge Crane’s cottage, and when between six and seven I did succeed in doing so, I was somewhat perplexed as to where my poison should be put. Let me make one thing very plain. Although Maurice Crane’s death changed me psychologically, so that from then on the driving force behind my actions was no longer my devotion to Madeline, but something rather different—in spite of all that, I never allowed myself, however strongly I may have been tempted, to kill indiscriminately, just for the sake of it. If I
had
succumbed to that temptation, the girl who chased me into the Maze would no longer be alive. Nor would you. Nor, probably, would several other people. But I have a good deal of self-control, and I kept myself in check. The mere pleasantness of an experience, however intense, does not justify one in over-indulgence, I consider. So you see, I’m not really the conscienceless monster some people will probably represent me to be!

All of which is by way of explaining the difficulty I was in after I’d climbed through a window into Madge Crane’s cottage. There seemed to be no medicine in this instance, and whatever else I poisoned the secretary might have eaten or drunk as well. In the upshot I had to fall back on the very unsatisfactory compromise of putting my colchicine in the gin. And again it worked exactly as I had intended—though not, of course, until thirty-six hours later.

That night I went again to Lanthorn House, and there operated on the steering-gear of Nicholas Crane’s car. I thought it very likely, you see, that as soon as the cause of Maurice Crane’s death was discovered Nicholas and Madge would be on their guard against poison; so additional plans had to be made. As you’ll remember, there was a script conference the following day, the Tuesday morning, and I was horrified when I saw David Crane drive up to the studios in Nicholas’ car. I had no grudge against David, no wish to see him die. After lunch, therefore, when the carpenters’ shop started work again, I disabled the engine as best I could with an iron bar I found in the garage. So tell that to anyone who’s stupid enough to think of me as a homicidal maniac!

On Tuesday evening I killed Nicholas. I’m sorry to say that he took me unawares—otherwise it would not have been such a head-on encounter. I have the right to be a little proud of myself, I think. He realised at once why I was there, he was bigger and stronger and younger than I, and he had a gun, while I had only a knife which I’d kept from my South African days. But I went for him baldheaded, and he was so flustered that his shot missed me by yards. The moment when the knife went into him was the best moment of all… You’ll be thinking, of course, that what I experienced was just a commonplace blood-lust. If you
are
thinking that, you’re wrong. I can safely say that my excitement was of an altogether more subtle and intellectual variety than
that.

Unfortunately, I lost my head as soon as the deed was done. When I heard someone approaching, I fled, not realising that it was only a solitary girl. You’ll have heard about our game of hide-and-seek in the Maze. Needless to say, I didn’t blunder into it intentionally! And there were times when I wondered if I should ever get out! The girl and I must have got to the centre, unbeknown to each other, by different routes. At the moment when she lit that match and screamed and fainted I’d just fallen over the mound of that grave in the darkness, and I was crawling about trying to discover if I was on the edge of some pit or other… Doubtless it was a little unnerving for her. Further scruples, you see! I must apologise to you for felling you and removing your guide-string, but you’ll appreciate that I was somewhat anxious to delay pursuit…