Murder by the Book (31 page)

‘And I thought we'd nabbed the bastard and closed the case, all bar the paperwork,' Mallory said.

‘You sure Kenny Wilson isn't mistaken about Martin?' Langham asked.

‘Wilson is one hundred per cent sure – and he was intimate with the blackmailer, after all.'

Mallory's office was a broom cupboard next to a briefing room, with only room for a chair on either side of a desk piled with folders. A bookcase stood beneath a dusty window, the shelves crammed with legal and procedural tomes as thick as Bibles.

Mallory indicated a chair. ‘Take a pew and I'll get the artist's impression. Tea?'

‘Black, no sugar.'

Mallory returned two minutes later with a chipped mug and a battered folder. He passed Langham the mug and sat behind his desk, withdrawing a single sheet of paper from the folder.

He sipped the stewed tea and grimaced. Mallory passed him the artist's impression. ‘Ring any bells?'

Langham took the portrait. The sketch showed a face in black and white, mawkish and overweight. He felt suddenly light-headed. He looked up at the detective, aware that his mouth was hanging open.

‘Donald?'

He murmured, ‘That's impossible …'

Mallory leaned forward. ‘What is?'

Langham closed his eyes and opened them, but the face refused to change. An older, fatter version of the man he had last met almost ten years ago stared out at him: the same small, mistrustful eyes, the same ugly upturned nose and tiny mouth …

‘It's Frank Pearson,' he said.

Mallory stared at him. ‘Just a minute …' He referred to papers in the folder and said, ‘Don, Pearson's body was discovered in Kent fifteen days ago.' He shook his head. ‘That's
before
the blackmail demands were made and the money collected. Are you absolutely sure it's Pearson?'

Langham stared at the face. ‘Absolutely. It's Pearson.'

‘OK, ‘Mallory said, ‘how about this. There were two of them, working together to blackmail Charles Elder: Frankie Pearson and an accomplice. Pearson blackmailed Elder, then …' he pointed a finger at Langham, ‘then the accomplice threw Frankie under a train to make it look like suicide and he collected the money, keeping all of it.'

‘And the other deaths? Why kill Nigel Lassiter, not to mention Cartwright, Sidley, Southern and Fellowes? And why attempt to kill Charles and Dame Amelia?' He stopped and stared across at Mallory, realization hitting him like something physical. ‘Hell …' he said.

‘Donald?'

‘I've got it – the connection between the victims.'

‘Go on.'

‘They all at one time, metaphorically, stabbed Pearson in the back, or that's how he saw it. Nigel Lassiter stopped collaborating with Pearson; Charles Elder dropped him from his stable in the thirties; Sidley rejected a Pearson novel and bought no more from him, and Cartwright … Well, at some point he wrote vitriolic reviews of everyone in the business, and I doubt Pearson escaped his poison pen.' He stopped. ‘Even me … I once gave Pearson a stinking review.'

‘And Fellowes, Southern and Amelia Hampstead?'

‘I don't know – but the chances are that they slighted Pearson somewhere along the line.'

Mallory interrupted. ‘You're forgetting one thing, Donald. Frank Pearson died, flattened by a train,
before
the killings.'

Langham recalled what Charles Elder had told him about Frank Pearson in his younger days and was suddenly overcome with a familiar sensation. He experienced it occasionally when the plot twist of a novel came to him, a gift of his subconscious. The feeling was one of euphoria, as the mental cogs turned and a solution offered itself.

He leaned forward. ‘Jeff, has Pearson been buried yet?'

Mallory referred to his papers. ‘He's still on ice. Various items identifying him as Frank Pearson were found on the corpse, but all dental records and any chance of identifying him from his fingerprints were destroyed by the train.'

‘So he hasn't been
positively
identified?'

‘No. He had no relatives, and even his agent couldn't make a positive identification. There wasn't much left to go on.'

‘Did you see the body?'

‘I was spared that.'

‘Does the report say anything about distinguishing features?'

Mallory pulled a typewritten sheet from the folder. ‘No, nothing.'

Langham sat back, releasing a long breath. ‘According to Charles Elder, Pearson had a massive scar from a knife wound just below his ribcage. He was stabbed in a tiff with a lover in his twenties, and he wasn't averse to showing off the wound when he was pissed.'

Mallory scanned the report. ‘Right. The body's in the morgue down at Hounslow. We can be there in ten minutes.'

They hurried from the building and a minute later were motoring south in Mallory's Humber.

Langham followed Mallory up the steps to the morgue, anticipation constricting his chest like an incipient coronary.

A surly mortuary attendant showed them into a tiled room, the entire right-hand wall of which consisted of square, enamelled white doors with big silver handles like so many domestic refrigerators stacked three high.

‘Pearson, nine hundred and thirty-seven?'

Mallory nodded and the attendant pulled open a door at waist-height and hauled out a sliding tray. The temperature in the room, already cold, dropped appreciably as the tray trundled out with an exhalation of freezing mist.

A pair of blue feet with misshapen big toes protruded from under a white shroud. The attendant drew the shroud from the bottom up, revealing a pair of fat white calves, a shrivelled scrotum and a huge gut.

The first thing Langham noticed was that the right arm terminated just below the wrist and the left hand across the knuckles, the blood scabbed and blackened. Further up, the way the shroud was folded neatly over the shoulders was ample evidence that the London train had achieved a clean decapitation.

He stared at the protuberant belly, searching it for the tell-tale knife scar.

There was no sign of a scar anywhere on the pallid, pudding-like fat.

Mallory nodded and the attendant pushed the tray back into the wall.

They left the building in silence, returned to the Humber and sat for a few seconds before Mallory said, ‘OK, Donald. Put your writing cap on. What happened?'

Langham had already thought through the likely scenario. ‘This is a vendetta, Jeff. Pearson has it in for people he sees as having slighted him throughout his career. He was an unsuccessful hack who had to churn out potboilers to make a living. There was a time when Frankie had a good publisher in Douglas and Dearing, and Nigel Lassiter put the kibosh on that. Then Charles Elder dropped him. And others put the boot in down the years, not that they would have seen it quite like that.'

‘So Pearson decides to take revenge?'

‘And dead men can't kill, can they?' Langham said. ‘So … he finds someone bearing a resemblance to himself, gets them drunk or kills them, puts his own papers or whatever about their person, then lays them on the track before the London train's due …' He shrugged. ‘After that, he can start his killing spree with impunity.'

‘Dead men can't kill …' Mallory repeated.

Langham said, ‘It's like the title of a bad thriller.'

‘And he's still out there …' Mallory paused and glanced at Langham. ‘Have you any idea who else he might target?'

A rapid heat passed through Langham as he thought of the paperbacks. ‘Just myself and Dame Amelia, of the writers,' he said. ‘If, that is, the authors of the books he left at Streatham were the only ones on his hit list. But then there are the editors and critics he took against.' He stopped. ‘Bloody hell …'

‘Don?'

‘It's just occurred to me …' He stared at Mallory, his pulse racing. ‘No wonder the crossbow killing in the garden seemed so familiar. Christ! And the killing of Gervaise Cartwright – the executioner's hood. I thought I'd read something similar somewhere.'

‘Don't tell me …' Mallory began.

‘I reviewed one of his books, way back. It was terrible, and I went to town on it. The thing is, I'm damned sure it featured a crossbow killing in a country garden. And I read another one by Frankie … and there was something in that one about a killer who stabbed his victims in the back and placed a hood on their heads.'

‘So he's killing his victims in ways he wrote about in his books?'

‘Without a doubt.' And what had Nigel Lassiter told him during their meeting at Tolly's – that Max Sidley had committed suicide in a manner described in one of his collaborations with Frankie Pearson?

‘In his own books and his collaborations with Lassiter,' Langham went on, and told Mallory about the manner of Sidley's ‘suicide'.

The detective was silent for a time. ‘How many books did Pearson write?'

‘Over a hundred, according to his agent. But the majority of those were under pen names. He wrote about six or so thrillers under his own name, and three collaborations with Nigel Lassiter.'

‘And he's using methods described in his own books, and his co-written ones, to bump off his victims,' Mallory said. ‘Right, I'll make a report for my super and call a briefing.' He looked across at Langham. ‘If I were you, Don, I'd think about getting out of town, lying low.'

Langham considered his options. ‘There's a hotel in Suffolk I'll book into with Maria. I'll leave you my contact details so you can keep me up to date.'

‘Things have developed pretty fast on the Maria front, haven't they?'

Langham nodded. ‘All in the last week. The terrible thing is, if it hadn't been for all …
this
, throwing us together …'

‘Fate is a bloody strange arbiter, Don.' Mallory started the engine and eased the car into the road.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘at least now we know who we're looking for. I'll get in touch with publishers. I still have contacts in the Crime Writers' Association. I'll put the word around that anyone who suspects that Frank Pearson might bear them a grudge should be extra vigilant. The thing is, I don't want the press to get hold of this. We have the advantage that Pearson doesn't know that we know he's still alive, and I want to keep it that way.'

Mallory drove back to Scotland Yard. Langham sat in silence for the duration of the journey.

Mallory glanced at him. ‘Penny for them, Donald?'

Langham shrugged. ‘I was just thinking about Gideon Martin. He was innocent …' He shook his head. ‘We shouldn't have chased him on to the roof, Jeff.'

Mallory shrugged. ‘He was up to no good at the Albemarle, Donald. And we weren't to know he wasn't the killer. Look, go easy on yourself, OK?'

Langham nodded absently, and five minutes later they pulled up outside Scotland Yard where they parted with an oddly formal handshake. Langham returned to his Austin and drove to Maria's apartment.

Over a cup of black Earl Grey, Langham told Maria about Frankie Pearson.

She sat in silence for seconds, then said, ‘This changes things, Donald. You cannot go back to stay at your flat. It's too dangerous.'

‘I'll just nip back to pick up a few books by Pearson.'

She looked at him quizzically. ‘Aren't they the last things you'd want to be reading right now?'

‘The odd thing is, each murder Pearson has committed is lifted from one of his own novels.' He shrugged. ‘I don't know, but maybe I'll be able to second guess his next victim from the books.'

‘But I thought he wrote hundreds?'

‘He did, but only nine or so under his own name – and it's from these that he's copying the murders.'

Maria nodded. ‘OK, you go, but be quick. I'll stay here today. The agency can go hang. When you get back I'll make you a nice cup of Earl Grey, yes?'

‘I'll say. And I was thinking …' He took her hand. ‘It'd be a good idea if we could get away for a while. Get out of London.'

She beamed. ‘That would be wonderful.'

He told her about the letter he'd received last week from the hotelier on the Suffolk coast. If he took up the invitation, that would kill two birds with one stone: give them a welcome break and get them away from the capital while the police worked to track down Frankie Pearson.

‘I'll ring later and book a room. Of course,' he went on, ‘we might have to pretend to be married.'

She laughed. ‘That might not be
so
difficult, Donald.'

He left Maria's apartment and motored over to Notting Hill.

He would spend no longer than was absolutely necessary at his flat, pack a few items of clothing and some books, then get away. He was struck at once by how absurd a notion it was that Frankie Pearson should still be alive and stalking those who had given him offence – and yet, despite the absurdity, he was gripped by a very real fear. Nigel Lassiter, too, would no doubt have laughed off any threat to his life if told that Frankie Pearson, a washed-up, alcoholic hack, was playing the part of an avenging angel.

He let himself into his flat and packed a case with clothing and toiletries. He moved to the study, slipped his portable typewriter into its case, and stood regarding the bookshelves against the far wall.

He was a creature of habit, and kept all of his books not only in alphabetical order but in chronological order of publication. Even his notional ‘to read' pile, which now filled several shelves and consisted of a few hundred books, was thus regimented.

He found three hardback novels by Frank L. Pearson which he hadn't read – publisher's review copies he'd set aside with the intention of one day selling to the second-hand bookshop around the corner. He took them from the shelf, then caught sight of the complete run of the
Capital Crime
magazine.