Murder by the Book (16 page)

He accounted for most of the wine himself, and then insisted on brandy to follow the coffee. By the end of the meal his face was a crimson beacon, his tiny eyes rheumy with unshed tears.

Towards four o'clock, with the debris of the meal littering the tabletop and Langham for his part feeling decidedly replete, Charles gripped their hands and declared, ‘You, my children, have made an old and foolish man very happy. Do you realize what a boon your friendship is to a man of my nature? All the money in the world cannot buy what you fine people give me. Now, let me settle the bill and flee before I embarrass myself and burst into tears.'

Charles was quiet during the drive back to his apartment, and Langham wondered if, after the excitement of the lunch, and in the maudlin aftermath of so much alcohol, the consequences of that morning's hearing were finally dawning.

They escorted Charles from the car and installed him on his settee with a cup of Earl Grey.

Maria knelt before him and took his hand. ‘I'll be in tomorrow morning, Charles. Business as usual.'

‘Business as usual …' he repeated somewhat sombrely.

‘And we'll take you out for dinner later this week,' Langham said.

Charles looked up. ‘I have a capital idea, my friends. I rather think I've had my fill of the metropolis for a while. What say you come up to my place in Suffolk for the weekend? I'll phone Mrs Carstairs to prepare the food, and we'll walk the countryside to give us an appetite.'

Maria looked at Langham. ‘Well, I'm free this weekend.'

Langham nodded. ‘That sounds wonderful.'

‘Oh, excellent, my friends. Excellent!'

‘Are you sure you'll be OK if we go now, Charles?' Maria asked, patting his hand.

‘You children go and enjoy yourselves. Go! If you pass me
The
Complete
…' he gestured to a buckram-bound volume on a nearby occasional table, ‘I will console myself with his sonnets.'

They took their leave and descended to the street in silence. As Langham drove Maria to Kensington, she said, ‘My father is hosting an awful drinks party tonight, and he really wanted me to show myself.'

‘Will you?'

‘I'll phone him and make some excuse. I really couldn't face my father's political friends right now. I need to sleep. And you?'

‘I've a pile of wretched thrillers to review, so I'd better burn the candle.'

He pulled up outside her apartment. She reached out and took his hand. ‘I'm so glad you've been around for the past few days, Donald. I don't know what I would have done without you.'

‘The feeling is mutual,' he said, and kissed her fingers.

‘Goodnight, Donald.'

‘Goodnight. Sleep well.'

He watched her climb from the car and run up the front steps. At the top she turned quickly before letting herself in, paused and waved.

He returned her wave and pulled out into the road.

L
angham poured himself a whisky and settled into his armchair by the window. He tried to read but found it hard to concentrate for thinking about the events of the day, the iniquity of Charles's situation, and Maria. She filled his thoughts as no one had for years, and he found the fact oddly ambivalent: on one hand he welcomed her sudden presence in his life, but on the other he was disconcerted by the distraction it brought. He was forty years old, for God's sake – surely too old to be falling in love. The helpless sensation brought to mind the last time it had happened, almost twenty years ago now, and the slew of painful associated memories.

He was saved further introspection by the summons of the phone.

‘Don? Jeff Mallory here. I'm in the Bull and wondered if you'd care for a pint?'

‘You've saved me from a dull evening of reading for review,' Langham said. ‘I'll see you there.'

He'd known Mallory for twenty years, having met the tall, tanned South African at a literary soiree in Hampstead. Mallory had just stepped off the boat from Cape Town; he'd sold his first detective novel to Jarrolds and was starting a new life in Britain. They'd hit it off immediately, helped by the fact that they both felt uneasy with the faux intellectual chatter and pernicious backbiting of the publishing world represented by the gathering.

They'd kept in contact over the years. Mallory had written that one novel and no more, struck by a block that Langham, as a big producer, found as alarming as the diagnosis of some dread disease. Mallory had joined the police force, and over the years worked his way through the ranks to the post of Detective Inspector at Scotland Yard. Langham found him an indispensable source of inside information when it came to researching his novels.

The sun was going down and the street lights coming on. Notting Hill was quiet, inhabited only by the occasional dog-walker. Even the high street was almost deserted, and quiet but for an oasis of light and revelry that was the Black Bull. A tangerine glow spilled into the twilight, along with the tinkle of a piano and bursts of raucous laughter.

He pushed through the door into a fug of warmth and cigarette smoke. It was a Wednesday night and the main bar was packed with drinkers marking the mid-point of the working week.

Detective Inspector Mallory waved from a booth at the back of the room, a big man in a rumpled, navy-blue pinstriped suit. Langham mimed drinking and Mallory lifted an almost empty glass. He eased his way to the bar, bought two pints of Watney's and carried them to the booth.

‘Aren't you a bit out of your usual stamping ground?' Langham said.

‘Just finished an interview around the corner. Popped in for a quick one. Cheers.' Three empties on the table before Mallory testified to the extent of the ‘quick one'.

‘Good health,' Langham said.

Mallory was not as tanned these days, and his blond thatch of old was thinning while his jowls were thickening.

‘It's been a while?' Mallory said. ‘Before Christmas?'

‘It must have been. You had the manuscript of my last one, and a bunch of notes almost as thick.'

Mallory laughed. ‘That's right. Scads of procedural errors. How's the work going?'

Langham always felt a little uneasy talking about his writing to Mallory, and found himself downplaying his success. ‘Can't complain. Still one a year, still popular with the old dears who patronize the lending libraries.'

‘I see you're still reviewing.'

‘For my sins.' He winced as the familiar line came out. ‘It makes up for the pitiful advances.' Which was another self-deprecating line: his advances were not that bad, and he continued the review column to keep his name in the public eye between book releases.

He took a mouthful of beer and changed the subject. ‘How's Dorothy?'

Mallory mock-flinched. ‘God, I haven't seen you since it happened?'

‘
What
happened?'

‘Well, things hadn't been too good between us for a while, and then I met someone …'

Mallory's gaze became distant. ‘Alice was … lovely. A bit younger than me. Twenty-five, in fact. Blonde, bubbly … An actress.'

Langham lifted his pint and drank. ‘“
Was?
”'

‘That's right. Was. I thought things were going well, thought I knew her, as you do. Then she buggers off. I found out later she'd been seeing someone a lot younger than me all the time we'd been together.'

Langham pulled a face. ‘I'm sorry.'

Mallory laughed bitterly. ‘Anyway, Dorothy wouldn't have me back. Serves me right. Dorothy was … is … a good woman. Hell, we'd been married for fifteen years. I was a damned fool to do what I did, and I got what I deserved when I tried to crawl back.'

‘Christ, Jeff.'

‘Yeah, well. That's water under the sodding bridge now, isn't it?' He saw that Langham's pint was almost empty. ‘Another?'

He drained his glass and passed it to Mallory.

He sat in the comfortable warmth while his friend was at the bar and looked around at the assorted faces. What surprised him was the variety of people who sought refuge in the Bull and in the balm of liquid anaesthesia it provided: middle-aged men in bowlers and suits who looked like city financiers, working men in flat caps playing cards and darts, casual bohemians who looked like artists, and blowsy, overdressed women who sat on high stools at the bar, smoking cigarettes and waiting for gentlemen customers to offer to replenish their gin and tonics.

He considered what Mallory had told him, and inevitably his thoughts strayed to Maria.

Mallory returned, sloshing their pints as he lodged them on the tabletop. He stared at Langham and said, ‘You've changed, Don.'

Langham lowered his pint. ‘I have?'

‘There's something about you tonight. Just before Christmas you were sozzled when we met and proceeded to get drunker. And you were grizzling about being alone. Now you seem much … dare I say it? … happier. What's happened?'

Langham smiled. ‘Is it that obvious?'

Mallory tapped his head. ‘Years of observing suspects trying to lie their way out of tight spots. You hone your observational senses, even if you don't know you're doing it. You're acting like a cat with the cream, Don. Who is she?'

Langham smiled. ‘Well, it's early days yet. I'm still not sure if she feels the same towards me. I've known her for years, but recent events have thrown us together. We get on tremendously; being with her just seems natural.'

‘You've got it bad. Looker?'

‘I'll say. And brains. Thirty, French, very … what's the word?
Chic
?'

Mallory concealed his grin with a long draught of beer.

Maria filled his mind's eye, and he found himself wondering what she was doing now.

‘Penny for them?'

Langham smiled. ‘I was just considering my good luck.'

‘Well, enjoy it while you can, Don. Nothing lasts for ever.' He shook his head. ‘Spoken like a true bleeding cynic. Ignore me. I'm happy for you.'

Langham changed the subject, asked Mallory about his work, and the detective wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pointed at him. ‘Glad you asked. When I found myself in the area I thought I'd call on you, kill two birds with one stone. Thought you might be able to help me with an investigation I'm working on.'

‘I write mysteries, Jeff; I don't solve them.'

‘I'll do the detective work – you just supply me with details.'

‘Fire away.'

‘You knew a writer chap called Gervaise Cartwright? Wrote under the name Gerry Carter. Didn't you collaborate with him on a few short stories just after the war?'

Cartwright was a rum character, an Old Etonian who affected a working-class accent and was never happier than when slumming it with criminal East End types, all in the name of research.

‘Go on, what's he done?'

‘Just gone and got himself murdered.'

‘Murdered? Christ, Poor Gervaise. When was this?'

‘Three days ago,' Mallory said. ‘How well did you know him?'

‘Not that well, really. I met him after the war at a dinner of the London Crime Club. We got talking about writing, batted a couple of ideas back and forth, and decided to collaborate on a few short stories. We sold five or six, as far as I recall.'

‘Why did you stop?'

Langham shrugged. ‘We were both busy with other projects. Gervaise churned out potboilers under his pen name and wrote reviews for the mainstream press under his real name. And to be honest, I didn't like the man that much.'

‘Why was that?'

‘He was a two-faced creep who was always very pally one to one, but wasn't averse to talking behind your back. He was notorious for giving competing writers bad reviews.'

‘So he made lots of enemies?'

Langham shrugged. ‘Only very sensitive, neurotic types would bear a grudge. But … yes, I suppose he wasn't well liked in the trade. He also hobnobbed with the criminal fraternity, so he might have made enemies there, too.'

‘Do you know if he still reviewed?'

‘He gave up his
Times
column about five years ago, as far as I recall.' He sipped his beer. ‘What happened?'

‘He was found by his housekeeper, sitting at his typewriter. He'd been stabbed through the back of a rattan chair. An eighteen-inch stiletto, straight through the ribs into the heart. Died instantly. An odd thing about the killing, though: he was wearing a hood over his head when he was found, like a black bag with holes cut out for the eyes—'

Langham raised a finger. ‘Like a hangman's hood?'

‘Yes, I suppose it was.'

‘That ties in. He had a nickname in the trade, for doling out those acid reviews. The Hangman.'

‘Ah …' Mallory said, lifting his pint. ‘Cheers. So … Maybe someone in the field was cut up about a bad review they'd received?'

Langham frowned. ‘But that would have been years ago.'

‘It's a line worth following,' Mallory said. ‘We reckon he died around midnight on Sunday. At seven the following morning his housekeeper went into his study and found him.' He shrugged. ‘We're working on the assumption that Cartwright knew his killer. There was no sign of a struggle or forced entry. He let the killer in late that night and was stabbed through the back of the rattan chair. Then the killer placed the hood on his head.'

‘Nasty,' Langham said.

‘I didn't know he was known in the trade as The Hangman,' Mallory said. ‘You've given me an interesting lead.'

‘I'll charge you at Sam Brooke's rate.'

Mallory smiled. ‘I'll pay you in pints, starting now. Fancy another before last orders?'

‘You've twisted my arm.'

The Gervaise Cartwright killing, he thought, sounded like something from a Golden Age whodunit: the body in the study, the stiletto, the hangman's hood … He wondered if it were these elements which gave it an air of familiarity, or if he had read of a similar murder somewhere before.