Gently with the Ladies (3 page)

Reynolds bowed his head and opened the door. He didn’t even leave a message.

Bland Street, Chelsea, was a short cul-de-sac ending with the block of flats called Carlyle Court. They had been built during the concrete phase of the ’thirties and had the air of a set from
Things To Come.
Slab fronts, in a medley of planes, concluded in small square towers roofed with copper domes, and the porch, a lofty Babylonian concept, carried giant bas-reliefs of wrestling women.

Reynolds rang and they were admitted by an elderly porter in a wine-coloured uniform.

‘This is Dobson,’ Reynolds said. ‘He let Fazakerly in on Monday.’

‘What time was that?’ Gently asked.

‘Half past three, sir,’ Dobson said.

‘You’re sure of the time?’

‘Oh yes, sir, definitely. That clock up there had just chimed the half-past.’

He spoke defensively, a faded old man with a waxed walrus moustache, standing peering up at Gently, his dulled eyes puckered and straining.

‘You know Fazakerly well, of course.’

‘Oh yes, sir. Been here several years.’

‘What did you make of him?’

‘Cheery, sir. Always had a kind word.’

‘Where did he leave his car on Monday?’

‘Out front there, like always.’

‘Like always?’

‘He was never in long, sir. Always out and about, that’s Mr Fazakerly.’

‘He parked his car, and you admitted him. Did you have any conversation?’

‘Well, just a few words, sir. You know how it is. Like if he’d had a good weekend, something like that.’ What sort of mood was he in?’

‘Cheery, sir. Never known him any different.’

‘Why didn’t you see him go out again?’

‘I must have been doing the boiler, sir.’

Gently nodded. He was conscious of a faint fragrance pervading the thickly-carpeted hall, the walls of which, rising to the height of the second storey, were ornamented with alcoves and thick gilded grilles.

‘Who runs this place?’

‘Mr Stockbridge, sir. He’s the manager, he is.’

‘Where can I find him?’

‘He’ll be in his office, sir. Down this corridor and on the right.’

Gently led the way down the corridor, which had plastered walls with a coloured stipple, and found a slab door painted plum red and lettered: C. F. Stockbridge (Manager). He knocked, and a voice told him to come in. They entered a large room with no windows. Instead, it was lit by concealed lights from behind panels on each of the four walls. A man rose from a desk spread with papers.

‘Oh, it’s you, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I was wondering when you’d look in . . . tell me, when shall we get possession?’

He was a dark-haired man in his forties, dressed in an expensive lounge suit. He wore an exquisite silk bow tie and had a red carnation in his button-hole.

‘You see, these places aren’t chicken-feed, and it’s my job to see they’re never empty. Frankly, Fazakerly couldn’t pay the rent, and you know what claiming on the estate is like . . .’

He gave Gently a sharp glance.

‘Do I know this gentleman?’ he asked Reynolds.

Reynolds murmured Gently’s name.

‘Ah!’ Stockbridge said. ‘More red tape.’

He drew out a slim cigarette-case-cum-lighter and lit a cigarette without offering them round. The room, apart from the desk and a single filing-cabinet, was furnished more like a lounge than an office. Stock-bridge sprayed smoke over their heads, eyed Gently again, but said nothing.

‘How much is their rent?’ Gently asked.

‘The Fazakerlys? Two hundred a month. Perhaps you’ll understand now—’

‘When did they come here?’

‘When? Oh, they’ve been here five years.’

‘So you know them well?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. It’s not my place to mix with the tenants. I see them, yes, we have a drink at Christmas. But I don’t know anything about their business.’

‘You knew which one held the purse-strings.’

‘Well, that was pretty obvious, wasn’t it? Mrs Fazakerly wrote all the cheques. It’s easy to spot a set-up like that.’

‘What sort of set-up, Mr Stockbridge?’

‘Where it’s the wife who calls the tune. Where the husband is just the boy round the place, a pet poodle in trousers.’

He stared fiercely at Gently. In a flashy way he had good looks; dark eyes, a tanned complexion, white teeth which he showed frequently. Yet there was a spivvishness in his manner, perhaps in the nattiness of his clothes. You might have placed him as a car-salesman or a high-pressure estate agent.

‘And Fazakerly accepted this situation?’

‘I don’t want to run the fellow down. I felt sorry for him, rather. I’ve got no quarrel with Fazakerly.’

‘Did they ever have rows?’

‘Not in public, anyway. In fact, you rarely saw them out together. Fazakerly has his interests, sailing, photography. I doubt if he was in the flat very much.’

‘Had he other women?’

Stockbridge shrugged. ‘Better ask him. He wouldn’t have a damn sight to run them on. And he wouldn’t and didn’t bring them here. Be no point in that, would there?’

‘There might have been someone here already.’

‘Possible. We don’t check on tenants’ morals.’

‘A neighbour.’

‘Could be.’

‘Say, Mrs Bannister?’

Stockbridge stared at him, shook his head.

‘But she was a friend of theirs, wasn’t she?’

‘Not of his. And anyway, you’d better forget that angle. Take it from me there’s nothing in it. He was no chum of Sybil Bannister’s.’

He didn’t take his eyes off Gently.

‘I’m telling you what you know, aren’t I?’ he said. ‘I daresay it’s pretty notorious, but it’s inside the law. We couldn’t clamp down on them.’

‘They made it fairly obvious, did they?’

‘Let’s say you didn’t have to wonder too much.’

‘And Fazakerly accepted that too?’

‘Apparently. I don’t know what was going on.’

He took a few quick draws at his cigarette, then turned to stub it out in a big silver ashtray. Though he was probably being quite frank he still gave a curious impression of insincerity.

‘Who were their other friends?’ Gently asked.

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there. She has a sister of course, I don’t know her name. Fazakerly would have his sailing pals.’

‘Where were you when it happened?’

‘Me? I was in the City. On the first Monday of each month I show my accounts at head office.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘In Old Broad Street. The Associated Holdings and Development Co.’

‘You didn’t see Fazakerly that day?’

‘I haven’t seen him since Friday.’

Gently had no more questions. Stockbridge followed them to the doorway. His last gambit, like his first, was:

‘But when are we going to get possession . . . ?’

They took a silent, gentle, plush-lined lift from the hall to the seventh floor, issuing out on a broad landing lit by a rooflight of thick green glass. The landing was treated as an anteroom and had green wall-to-wall carpeting, three chairs, formed from bended green glass, and a small table of like material. The walls were finished in green plaster with a pattern of whorls. There were two doors, also green, but the smaller of them probably served a closet.

‘Who are the neighbours?’ Gently asked.

‘There aren’t any, Chief . . . not up here. There’s a penthouse flat on the other side of the block, but of course that doesn’t connect with this.’

‘Who’s underneath?’

‘Mrs Bannister.’

‘Does she go in for this sort of décor?’

Reynolds apparently thought this a joke, for he gave a conscious sort of snigger.

He unlocked the larger of the doors. They went through into a long hallway. It too was lit by green glass rooflights and had the same submarine character as the landing. On the walls, in moulded glass frames, hung a series of Japanese prints of fish; fat, voluptuous, swirling monsters with sad eyes and gaping mouths. Glass furniture was ranged beneath them and at the end of the hall stood a glass fountain. It was in the form of a nymph who poured water from a glass pitcher into a glass rock-pool.

‘That was working . . . I switched it off. There’s a tank of green-coloured water. Everything’s the same except in Fazakerly’s room. She was a blonde, maybe that explains it.

‘She was more than a blonde,’ Gently grunted.

‘You should see the bathroom. And her bedroom.’

‘Just now, I’d sooner see the lounge.’

‘It’s this door on the right.’

The lounge was a handsome room with a long veranda which looked over roofs to the Albert Bridge. From any one of its ten windows you could see a stretch of the river. It was furnished expensively, not in glass, but with neo-Victorian stuffed furniture. Curtains of heavy apple-green velvet swathed windows and door. The carpet was a green Persian and there were green Chinese vases in an alcove, and supporting the alcove, in green carved frames, two Etty, or near-Etty, nudes. A book-case painted in the prevailing colour contained books bound in a soapy green calf; they were poets of a romantic cast mingled with some Oriental erotica. On a low tray-table stood six jade figurines of posturing female nudes, while a green soapstone sculpture, on a japanned base, frankly symbolized a female genital organ. A bronze incense-burner stood near it. A perfume of cypress pervaded the room.

‘Where was the belaying-pin kept?’

Reynolds pointed to a section of varnished pin-rail. It was fastened to the wall between two of the windows and partly hidden by the fall of the curtains. In effect it was exactly behind the vast settee on which Mrs Fazakerly’s body had been discovered. If she were sitting on the settee one could have seized the pin and struck her all in one movement.

‘Not very obvious, Chief . . . up there?’

No: not very obvious at all. In fact, if the curtains had been allowed to fall naturally, it would have been hidden altogether. Meanwhile, distributed about the room, were several alternative weapons: the incense-burner, the bit of soapstone, two silver candle-sticks, a green glass door-stop.

‘Fazakerly would know where to go for it. A stranger here wouldn’t know.’

‘But why?’ Gently grunted. ‘Why go for a weapon that had his name on it?’

‘I’d say it was the natural weapon for him. He was crazy mad and he went straight for it.’

‘If he was crazy mad he wouldn’t go round there. He’d grab that bronze job or a candlestick. Was there blood on the floor?’

‘Well . . . some splashes.’

‘But she was killed on the settee, where the mess is?’

Reynolds nodded.

‘So at the height of this row she was calmly sitting there, watching Fazakerly go after the pin.’

‘We don’t know exactly . . .’

‘But does it make sense?’

Reynolds shrugged his shoulders diplomatically.

‘It doesn’t,’ Gently snorted. ‘It’s a different picture. It’s a picture of something much more calculated.’

He went behind the sofa.

‘This makes more sense. She’s sitting there quietly talking to someone. Someone who knows what they’re going to do and what the weapon’s going to be. Someone who’s moved across to the window, who’s saying something about the view, about the curtains . . . then, before she can move to defend herself, out comes the pin and she’s had it. Isn’t that more convincing?’

‘But there was a row, Chief . . .’

‘Wait a minute, here’s something more! Suppose Fazakerly was mad enough to use that pin, why didn’t he then throw her over the veranda?’

‘The veranda . . . ?’

‘Yes – seven floors up – did she fall or was she pushed? Then a quick mop-up job on the settee, and it’s better than evens he’d get away with it.’

Reynolds didn’t say anything. He stood looking unhappily at the settee. It suggested, perhaps more than words could, that Gently was beginning to overplay his hand.

‘All right . . . forget it for the moment!’

‘But . . . surely he’d panic a bit . . . after . . .

‘Forget it. I’m just throwing out ideas.’

Nevertheless, Reynolds went to stare over the veranda.

Gently jammed his pipe into his mouth and made a big business of lighting it. Making a firm enemy of Reynolds was about all he’d get out of championing Fazakerly. So there were loose ends and discrepancies – wasn’t it always so, on any case? Were you never surprised by illogical details, even in cases where the main facts were indisputable? Much more important than the position of the pin-rail was Fazakerly’s awareness that the pin had been used, his being seen running down the stairs, the equivocal impression he made. The last especially would weigh with a jury. It had hung more men than had hard fact.

Reynolds came back in.

‘I don’t think it was on, Chief.’

‘Never mind about that. Just give me a timetable.’

‘Somebody would have seen him from the street . . .’

‘We’re wasting time. Let’s get to facts.’

According to medical evidence Clytie Fazakerly had died at between two and four p.m. on the Monday. She was last seen alive, except by Fazakerly, by Mrs Bannister, with whom she had lunch. She left Mrs Bannister’s flat at about two-forty p.m. She was in good spirits; they had planned, in the evening, a visit to a club cabaret in Soho. At three-thirty p.m. Fazakerly returned from his weekend sailing trip. A little later Mrs Bannister heard sounds of an altercation in the flat above. Altercations between the Fazakerlys were not unusual but this one sounded particularly violent and Mrs Bannister came out on her landing the better to hear what was going on. She heard Fazakerly calling his wife names in an angry manner. She also heard Mrs Fazakerly say something like: ‘So you’ll drop this bitch, or I’ll—!’ Soon after that the voices stopped and she heard the slamming of a door, then quick footsteps on the stairs, and she saw Fazakerly running down them. His face was pale and his eyes wild-looking. He didn’t notice Mrs Bannister. Her indicator told her the lift was in use, which she supposed was why Fazakerly was using the stairs. She was concerned, but not alarmed, and decided not to intrude on Mrs Fazakerly. At four-twenty-five p.m. the body was discovered by the Fazakerlys’ housekeeper, a Mrs Lipton, who had a free period on Monday and was not due to arrive until four-thirty p.m. The body was in a sitting position on the settee and the belaying-pin lay on the floor a few feet distant. Mrs Lipton rushed down the stairs and informed Mrs Bannister, who immediately telephoned the police.