Waiting for Orders (24 page)

The McGowans returned first. Jack met them at the station with the Crossley. They had a festive air about them and that evening at dinner Rowe was bold enough to comment on it. ‘You’ve been shopping for a dress,’ he told Jenny; ‘I know the look. Is it to be in a church or a registry office?’

Tom McGowan bridled. ‘If you know what a special licence cost you’d not be asking such a damn fool question.’

‘Then it’s to be a registry office, eh?’

I am sure that neither Jack nor Annette uttered a word to anyone, but the idea of a wedding was now abroad at the Farm and the village girl who did Mrs Cole’s housework also went in twice a week to the McGowans. Word must have reached Auntie Alice very quickly.

I knew when Blag was back because I heard the hire car from Pinner drive away and saw a light in the wall door of the studio. When I went down next morning to make myself tea and toast Jack had a message for me. ‘He wants to work. He’d like you to model for him. Gardening togs. Ten o’clock.’

I had been in the walled garden before to do weeding and other odd jobs but I had not seen inside the studio. It was bigger than it looked from the outside. From the inner doorway you saw a deep lofty room with a broad skylight at least thirty feet long, and tall windows with slatted blinds on the garden side. It seemed full of light. There was a tilted drawing table as well as easels and work tables. One of the easels carried a large pin board with drawings and photographs tacked to it. The drawings were mostly sketches of the actor-manager’s head and hands and bits of them. The photographs were glossy and more difficult to see from where I stood.

Blag came through a doorway at the other end of the studio. There was a faint smell of cooked kippers. That seemed to be his kitchen with the bed-sitting room beyond.

‘Hallo, Charlie,’ he said; ‘did they get off to the framer’s all right?’

‘Those boxes of Mr McGowan’s wouldn’t all go in the Morris.’

‘I told Jenny they’d need the big car. Who helped her?’

‘Jack and me. Jenny said they’d be back late but not to worry.’

‘The framer’s in Fulham. They’re having dinner with Tom’s sister in Chelsea. What do you think of it?’

He had caught my eyes wandering to the biggest photograph pinned to the board. It was the blow-up Rowe had done of the Everard head.

‘From that fuzzy old print it’s amazing.’

‘I expect you’re right. Charlie, why don’t you try sitting on that bar stool over there. Yes, the one with the arms. Now, lift your head a bit and look out of the window. Head right a bit. What do you see? A flower bed, but what flowers? Geraniums. All right. Relax, but hold still.’

He had a double-demy sheet of cartridge paper pinned to a board on the smaller easel. The easel was on castors. He wheeled it into a position somewhere behind my left shoulder and began to draw. He used charcoal at first then crayon. Then there was a smell of turpentine and he began dabbing at the
paper with a sponge. He caught me looking at him and told me to keep still. ‘Relax but keep still,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you when you can move. I’m working in pastel now but I’m using turps as well. You’ll look like something by Dégas.’

It was a long time before he spoke again and the cramp in my neck was becoming really painful when there was a hammering at the door to the yard, the one I had come through, and the sound of a woman shouting.

Blag said: ‘You can rest for a bit, Charlie, but don’t go away. Stay where you are.’

He went to the door and opened it. The noise was coming from Auntie Alice and the golf club she was using as a hammer.

‘What on earth are you doing, Alice?’

She pushed past him into the studio. ‘The car,’ she said. ‘That McGowan girl’s taken the car. And on my club day. What right has she?’

‘I told her to take it. It’s a family car. Everyone uses it.’

‘The McGowans are not family.’

‘They’re part of
my
family, Alice,’ he said, ‘whether you and Mother Autumn like it or not.’ He said it very distinctly.

‘You’re breaking her heart,’ Alice sobbed, and then burst into tears. The worst was over. With her grey shingled hair, her tweed skirt and her golfing brogues Alice wasn’t dressed for grief, not the persuasive kind. Blag gave her his handkerchief to dry her eyes. ‘Jack’ll drive you in the Morris,’ he said.

‘But you’ll come and talk to your mother tonight? Blag, you did promise.’

‘Oh yes, I promised. Off you go, Alice. Talk to Jack.’ He shut the door behind him and returned to the easel. ‘All right, Charlie,’ he said; ‘let’s get back to work.’

He worked another hour and then sent me off to lunch. He said that I could have a look at the picture the next day.

I was late for lunch and tired. Annette made me an omelette. After that I went up to my room meaning to read Maitland. Instead I fell asleep. When I woke up I had a bath and changed into my father’s Savile Row tweed. Then I walked to the pub, not along the river path because I didn’t want Mother Autumn to see me, but along the road. At the pub I met Rowe who had used the road for the same reason as I had. I experimented with a gin and ginger ale.

We were late back for dinner which was Annette’s superb rabbit casserole with the white wine and basil sauce. All of us, including the Hunters, drank a lot of wine with it. After dinner they taught me to play nap. It was quite dark when the party broke up. To get some air I went for a walk along the river bank. Then, when it began to drizzle with rain, I quickly walked back.

The studio lights were all on and spilling into the yard. Blag, I thought, would be waiting for Jenny to return home. I was at the top of the spiral staircase when I heard the shot. It was quite a loud bang. I went back down the stairs. As soon as I reached the door I recognized the fired cartridge smell. I called to him. ‘Are you there, Blag? Are you all right?’ Then I went in.

He was lying on his back at the foot of the easel he had been using that morning and the blood was still pumping from the huge wounds in his chest and neck. The padded end of a mahlstick I had seen him use that morning was clutched in his right hand. In the few seconds I stood looking at that ghastly red bubbling mess my only thought was that the heart must still be beating. So I blundered out into the yard and ran for help.

It took me an age to get it. The Hunters were sound asleep and hard to wake. I knew that Rowe also had a telephone so tried shouting at him to call a doctor. The noise I made brought Jack downstairs with a raincoat over his pyjamas. I did
not
say ‘Blag’s shot himself.’ I said, ‘Blag’s been shot.’ Jack said, ‘Dear God Almighty’ and ran to the studio door. As I followed him I was chattering about getting a doctor.

Minutes must have elapsed between my finding Blag wounded and re-entering the studio with Jack. The second time was quite different. I could not stand where I had stood before. There was the family shot-gun lying on the floor just where I had stood.

Jack was crouched over the mess on the floor. He glanced up at me sharply. ‘If you’re going to puke, Charlie,’ he said, ‘you’d best do it outside. It’s not the local doctor we’ll be needing but the police surgeon.’

Blag had thrown a cloth over the portrait on the easel. Now Jack pulled it off to cover the dead man’s face. That left my face looking at me from the easel. As Jack had suggested I should, I went outside to be sick.

I was still doing so when the lights of the returning Crossley
swept into the stable yard of Elm Park Farm. Jenny had returned. The bad dream entered its horror phase.

The coroner’s inquest was at Isleworth near the hospital at which the autopsy had been performed. The courtroom was a territorial drill hall with not enough seating to accommodate the press. The place was packed.

The Coroner was a local medical officer of health with some forensic qualifications. I was among the first to give evidence. I told the court about hearing the shot, about finding Blag wounded and about running for help to the Hunters.

That is Mr Jack Hunter who called the police?’

‘Yes, sir. There was nothing I could have done for those wounds, but Jack had been in the war.’

‘Thank you, Mr Blagden. I’m sure you did all you could. You saw Mr Cole that morning. How would you describe his state of mind?’

‘Impatient, sir. He wanted no interruptions of his work or of his life.’

That was the end of me. Jack Hunter came next. The star turn, however, was Dr Lionel Benton-Black who had an address in Harley Street and who was consultant neurologist at a London teaching hospital. Blag Cole had been a patient of his for nearly twenty years.

‘Suffering from what disease, Doctor?’

‘I don’t know for certain, sir, and now I never shall. His sister had died of Hereditary Progressive Chorea when he was referred to me. That is the disease of the central nervous system which is now generally known as Huntington’s disease. The disease is hereditary and genetically transmitted through either parent or both. There is at present no blood or other body fluid test that can detect its presence. There are Huntington families – I know too many of them – and they are in a sense doomed. If the disease is there genetically, it can always strike, most commonly in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth decades of a person’s life. There are family histories of Huntington’s going back ten generations. It has been described as the most vicious of hereditary diseases. Vicious is not a scientific term but I can understand its use in this context.’

‘When did you last see the deceased?’

‘Three weeks ago. He said he had firm evidence to show that his father, the proved Huntington’s carrier in that family, had not been his natural father. He claimed that he had been conceived illegitimately before his mother’s marriage to Mr Cole. He could not, he argued, be a Huntington’s carrier. There was no reason, therefore, why he could not marry and beget children.’

‘Did you believe him, Doctor?’

‘He had a good case, and photographs and other documents to support it. Probably all fantasy. With those who reach middle age it often happens. They have fantasies. Then they commit suicide. With men that is the most common outcome. I told Blagden Cole that on the subject of marriage he must use his own judgement.’

The verdict, of course, was suicide, ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed.’

On the way out I felt a tap on my shoulder.

‘Hello, young man.’ It was Mr Bristow. ‘You look as if you could do with a beer.’

I was glad to see him. I needed someone to share my awful secret. When I told him about the shot-gun that wasn’t there when I found Blag but
was
there when I returned with Jack Hunter he nodded approvingly. ‘Not suicide, you think, but murder. What did the police think of the idea?’

‘They were patient and kind. Naturally, when I found Blag with those terrible injuries I would be in a state of shock. It was quite understandable that I hadn’t noticed the gun first time.’

‘And it was understandable.’

‘It was also understandable that Blag would hold the mahlstick by the wrong end. The police say that he used the stick to press the shot-gun trigger and kill himself.’

‘And you don’t?

‘I think that when he saw the gun pointing straight at him he grabbed the stick to try to deflect the gun barrel. He almost succeeded. The wounds were mainly on the right side.’

He sipped his beer. ‘And who pointed the gun? Mother Autumn?’

‘Blag went to see her that evening to confront her with that picture of Councillor Everard that you found for him and to announce his marriage. When he left she took the gun, which
was kept with Alice’s golf clubs, and followed him. She shot him. Then, still holding the gun she walked back to her own house. On the way she met Alice who had heard the shot. It was Alice who took the gun from her and left it on the studio floor for us to find.

‘You’ll never prove any of that, young man.’

‘I won’t be trying, Mr Bristow.’

He had been fumbling in his brief-case. Now he pulled out a print of the Councillor Everard blow-up. ‘You may like this as a souvenir,’ he said. ‘The case for Everard as Blag’s natural father is about as sound as the verdict of suicide to which we have just listened. Everard married twice but had no children. His fault, probably. As a young man he had a commission in the Yeomamy and, in the year before Blag was born, attended an Officers’ Ball at Preston barracks at which Miss Emma Blagden was also present. That is recorded in a local newspaper of the time. I say no more. Good luck with the law, young man. I have a train to catch at Euston.’

When I got home I showed the photograph to my mother.

‘That one never fathered Blag,’ she said. ‘Nothing like him. Wrong bones. The only good portrait I’ve ever seen of Blag was the one he did of his mother. I mean the nasty one he wrote on the back of, the one he said was of Ibsen’s Mrs Alving.’

It was over twenty years before the subject of Blagden Cole came up again between us. In the mid-fifties a play of mine was opening in New York and she came over to see it. Of course, she had pieces of gossip.

‘Do you remember that girl Jenny, the one Blag Cole was going to marry? Well, after the suicide I kept in touch with her. Blag had got her pregnant you know. Well, you wouldn’t know. You were away.’

‘What happened?’

‘She had a daughter. Nice child. Died in her twenties, poor thing.’

‘Huntington’s?’

‘Yes, I thought you’d be interested. My new doctor says they think now that in ten or twelve years’ time they may be able to tell if someone’s a carrier. Gene-mapping they call it. Yes, Jenny herself is all right. Children’s book illustrating. I have to
admit, though, I always found her a teeny bit silly.’ She was silent for a moment and then sighed. ‘Of course one has to be fair. You thought that mother of his shot him, and perhaps you were right. But the one who really did for poor old Blag was the piano tuner.’

Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler was born in London in 1909. Before turning to writing full-time, he worked at an engineering firm, and wrote copy for an advertising agency. His first novel was published in 1936. During the course of his career, Ambler was awarded two Gold Daggers, a Silver Dagger, and a Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain, named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers Association of America, and made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In addition to his novels, Ambler wrote a number of screenplays, including
A Night to Remember
and
The Cruel Sea
, which won him an Oscar nomination. Eric Ambler died in 1998.