The Worm of Death

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  Title Page

  Note to the Reader

  I. Last Entry—In Part

  II. Dinner at the Doctor’s

  III. Missing from his Home

  IV. A Wind from the North-East

  V. Unkindest Cuts

  VI. 7 + 13 = 20

  VII. Chain Reactions

  VIII. A House in the Isle of Dogs

  IX. Labyrinth of Lies

  X. Whiffs from the Past

  XI. The Naked and the Dead

  XII. A Silk Stocking

  XIII. The High Old Roman Way

  XIV. How the Body Vanished

  XV. The Sorrows of Walter

  XVI. Out of Mourning

  XVII. On the Mud

  XVIII. Last Entry—In Full

  More from Vintage Classic Crime

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Several days after private detective and poet Nigel Strangeways dines with Dr Piers Loudron and his family, the doctor vanishes, only for his legless corpse to be fished out of the river Thames. When his family ask Nigel to protect their interests during the police investigation, it soon becomes apparent that each member of the deceased’s family, from his adopted son to his daughter’s unpleasant fiancée, had a strong motive for killing him.

  As the winter fog swirls outside, Nigel must find his way through a maze of conflicting stories, missing diaries and red herrings.

  About the Author

  Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.

  During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  A Question of Proof

  Thou Shell of Death

  There’s Trouble Brewing

  The Beast Must Die

  The Widow’s Cruise

  Malice in Wonderland

  The Case of the Abominable Snowman

  The Smiler with the Knife

  Minute for Murder

  Head of a Traveller

  The Dreadful Hollow

  The Whisper in the Gloom

  End of Chapter

  The Sad Variety

  The Morning After Death

  NOTE TO THE READER

  I have taken three liberties in this book: (a) to alter the weather of February, 1960; (b) to build a house where no house is—on a certain quay in East Greenwich; and (c) to install Dr. Piers Loudron, his daughter and two of his sons, in my own house at Greenwich.

  N.B.

  CHAPTER I

  Last Entry—In Part

  . . . SO THERE IT is. He intends to kill me. And I must let him kill me. I’ve slept on it, and that is my conclusion. I owe it to him—or rather, to her.

  I hope, when the time comes (to-night? to-morrow? next week?), I shall have the resolution not to resist—life-and-death scuffles are so ignominious. But shall I? Interesting. Mind over matter; and in my experience matter wins every time.

  It all depends how, I dare say. Poison? Enough lethal drugs in the dispensary to put down half my patients. No doubt he’d like to see me expire—justice must be seen to be done—an eye for an eye—that’s our Jewish blood. But, since he does not know that I intend to go like a lamb to the slaughter, he’d be afraid of my denouncing him in extremis.

  What then? Bullet, knife, strangling, gas, blunt instrument, a strong push into the river? There are so many possibilities I must be on my guard not to guard against.

  Knowing him, I know it will be something cold and cunning. Yes, and apt—the punishment fitting the crime: the emotionally retarded, immaturable sort of mind works in that sort of adolescent symbolism. Crude. The poetry of the primitive, the poetic justice of the child.

  Oh, my child, our child.

  Should I appeal to him, not to his heart—he has none now, where I am concerned—but to his self-interest? It would be total humiliation; but worse, a humiliation in vain, for he is implacable. It’s not merely what he said. It’s how he said it, how he looked: I am not the best diagnostician in S.E. London for nothing, I have always known mortal illness when I saw it—a man’s death first lifting up its little worm’s head within him; and now I know the look of a man set upon another’s death—the look which only his victim sees, and which so many victims fail to recognise.

  Self-interest! He has only one self-interest now. A monomania. To destroy me. Let him.

  Thou shalt not be killed, but needs’t not strive

  Officiously to stay alive.

  Yes, that’s all very amusing and intrepid. But the morality of it? Do I consider it a good thing, in the interests of justice—personal justice as between him and me—to let him become, through my own passivity, a murderer? Ought I not to protect him from himself by protecting myself from him? A nice point in ethics.

  If one believed in the soul, in eternal damnation, there would be no problem. But I do not.

  If I loved him, love might tell me the right answer. But evidently I do not: it’s what he represents for me—there’s the bond, the beautiful, ingrown, paralysing bond.

  Anyway, how the devil should I protect myself against him? I can’t wear armour all day and have every meal analysed before I eat it!

  How Janet would have revelled in this situation, with her Wee Free sense of sin and retribution! Cast thy haggis upon the waters, etc. No, I should not be mocking at poor Janet—after all, I’m half Scottish myself. And she did her best; brought me all that money and gave me children and made an excellent housekeeper.

  Let me face it, there’s an ineradicable streak of cheapness in me. Men at the point of death shouldn’t indulge their levity.

  I wonder what they’ll do with the money when I’m dead. James will save it, Harold squander it; Becky will marry that worthless little buffoon: and Graham?—how would he use it? They should each get £30,000 after death-duties are paid, and that’s not counting my life assurance policies—another £8,000 to split up between them. Unless . . .

  Good God, yes, that’s it! Forestall him. If I died before he could kill me—why didn’t that occur to me?—it would solve the whole problem. Justice would be done without making him a murderer. The high old Roman way out of trouble. Fall on one’s sword—only I haven’t got a sword, and if I had I’m so light I should probably bounce off the point. Petronius then. The hedonist’s method. Euthanasia. Yes, that’s the answer.

  But don’t think of it in terms of expiation. It is simply to save him—I mean, to pacify her shade. Expiation is a meaningless concept, socially, however necessary it may be for the individual’s peace of mind. . . .

  CHAPTER II

  Dinner at the Doctor’s

  NIGEL STRANGEWAYS AND Clare were strolling down the hill past the park. It was foggy, this February night, and the six o’clock news had promised worse fog to come. From the Thames a hoars
e bellowing broke out, and like the pandemonium in a jungle when one great animal roars, it was followed by a series of hoots, yelps, bronchitic snorts and breathy howls as the river traffic crept cautiously through the mirk. If the fog got worse, the traffic would seize up altogether.

  It was only two months since Nigel and Clare had moved to Greenwich; but these river noises, which even on a clear night seemed to come from no particular direction but to sound stereophonically all round one’s house, were already familiar to them—an intermittent background music to their works and days.

  “I love this place,” said Clare, slipping her hand into Nigel’s overcoat pocket. “I can work here.”

  They had rented two floors of a Queen Anne house overlooking the park. The ground floor, for all its age, was solid enough to support the masses of stone which Clare worked on. They had turned the double drawing-room into a studio, and acquired a daily to do the cleaning. This admirable woman, Em, a lighterman’s wife of proportions almost as titanic as the over-life-size nude which Clare was sculpting, had reeled back when she first saw it, exclaiming, “God! What’s that thing?”

  “A female nude.”

  Em eyed it as if it were some convulsion of nature. “Fair gives you the creeps, don’t it?” she said. “See its bloody double, I did once, when our Stan took me to one of them H films.”

  But after this shaky start, though Em would never take a duster to any of the figures in the studio, she and Clare got on famously, gossiping away like mad while the chips flew and the cups of char flowed down Em’s enormous gullet.

  Through Em, they were already well briefed about the Loudrons, with whom they were dining to-night. Dr. Piers Loudron had been in practice here for nearly forty years: “A lovely man, a real gent, don’t stand no nonsense though, saved our Stan when we all thought he was going to croak”—these were some of the tributes paid by Em, whose view of the medical profession ranged otherwise from the sardonic to the blistering. Dr. Piers’s eldest son, Dr. James Loudron, who was in practice with him, she dismissed as a poor substitute for his dad: he took all day to make up his mind whether you’d got sunburn or leprosy; he had newfangled notions; he failed to hand out those “bottles of the pink” which were Dr. Piers’s panacea for wind; he was a stickler for etiquette and printed forms—“wouldn’t cut you up without he had a dotted line to cut along.” James’s younger brother, Harold, was something in the City and lived in a house on the river bank with his wife, Sharon, as to whom Em said she couldn’t half tell you some dirt if you pressed her—and told you a good deal without pressure. Dr. Piers’s own household was made up by an adopted son, Graham, and a daughter, Rebecca, who now housekept for him, his wife having died some twenty years ago. Rebecca, according to Em, “favoured her Mum, poor soul.” As to Graham, Em gave the impression that he was a dark horse and a bit of a lad, and that Dr. Piers had a special soft spot for him.

  The amber street-lighting, which turned Clare’s magnolia-white skin to an implausible mauve, filtered through the fog to show the façade of an early-Georgian house, one of two pairs, at the corner of Grooms Hill and Burney Street. The woodwork outside was painted white. So, they found when they went in, was the panelling of the hall, the stairs, and the first-floor drawing-room to which Rebecca Loudron led them.

  “My goodness, what a lovely room!” exclaimed Clare, her eyes roving over the yellow fitted carpet, the glowing little landscapes set within the white panels, the richly-patterned curtains with their design of yellow flowers and grey feathers in swags on a white background, the button-back chairs, yellow, green, dove-grey, and a single tomato-coloured one echoing the red in a picture on the far wall.

  “And what exquisite proportions! It’s almost a perfect cube, isn’t it?”

  “What? Oh, is it? I’m afraid I don’t know much about architecture. I’m glad you like it.” Rebecca Loudron was clearly not at ease with strangers. Her sentences came blurting out, as though she had not breath enough for more than a few words at a time, and her sallow face flushed darker. She’d be quite handsome, thought Nigel, if she took herself in hand: but what possessed her, with that complexion, to wear a coffee-coloured dress?

  “Well, I do congratulate you on this room,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s Father really. He’s the one with taste. He’s very fastidious—you know, about colours and things, I mean.”

  “Unusual in a doctor, that, isn’t it?” said Clare, appearing not to notice the overtones in Miss Loudron’s last remarks.

  “I suppose so. But it needs money, and time too.” Rebecca lapsed back into the artificial hostessy manner of a small girl entertaining her dolls to a tea-party. “My brothers will be down soon. The fog seems to be getting worse—James must have been delayed on his rounds. How do you like living in Greenwich, Mrs. Strangeways?”

  “Very much. But I’m not Mrs. Strangeways, you know. Clare Massinger,” said Clare, smiling pleasantly.

  “Oh. But I thought—I mean——” Rebecca flushed and floundered. Nigel came to her rescue.

  “No. We live together. But Clare is tremendously old-fashioned. She believes that marriage is for the procreation of children and the raising of families. And her life-work is making her children out of stone and wood. She simply couldn’t divide her attention between them and real ones. So we’ve never married. But it’s all very respectable.”

  “Oh, I do admire that!” exclaimed Rebecca, unexpectedly.

  “What do you admire, Becky dear?” came a voice from the door.

  “Mr. Strangeways was telling me about Miss Massinger’s sculpture. Miss Massinger, let me introduce my brother James.”

  Dr. James Loudron was a bulky, awkward, sallow-faced man of about thirty, with a distinct resemblance to his sister. His eyes had a guarded look, which might mean discretion or secretiveness, and made the heartiness of his manner seem superficial.

  “Well, you might have given them a drink,” he said.

  “I was waiting for you.”

  James Loudron dispensed drinks, with the air of pouring them from a graduated measure. While he was thus engaged, his sister murmured aside to Clare:

  “I wouldn’t mention—what we were talking about. James is rather conventional, you know.”

  James came over from the piano, on which the drink tray rested. When he had given them their glasses, he stooped down, washing his hands at the fire.

  “Devilish cold to-night. And the fog’s going to get worse. Hope Mrs. Hyams doesn’t start.”

  “You doctors,” remarked Clare in her high, light voice, “do live restless lives. Always leaping up from the table to rush out and deliver another baby.”

  “We’re used to that,” said Rebecca. “Meals in this house are movable feasts.”

  James was looking at Clare as if he had not properly seen her before. “You know Mrs. Hyams?.”

  “No. I was just making a deduction.”

  “I see,” he solemnly replied. “Quite. She is expecting to be confined any day now. Have you any children, Miss—er—Mrs.——?”

  “Only stone and wood ones,” Rebecca put in, with a skittishness Nigel found slightly embarrassing.

  “Stone and wood babies?” asked James, baffled.

  A voice from behind them said, “She carves them, brother James. She’s a sculptor. She sculpts. Or should it be sculptress?”

  “Sculptor,” said Clare. “How do you do?”

  “I’m honoured to meet you. I’m Graham Loudron.”

  The young man who came forward, after delivering these remarks with a perfectly expressionless face, was of medium height, lean and whippy—about twenty years old, Nigel judged, though it was difficult to tell with a face in which experience and immaturity were so patently blended: the cosmopolitan sort of face one might expect to see above a white sharkskin dinner-jacket in some smarty night-club.

  Taking a drink, Graham perched himself easily on the arm of Rebecca’s chair. “Hello, ducky. How’s the dinner going? My sister is a first-class coo
k. That’s because she’s so greedy.”

  “I’m not!” cried Rebecca, highly delighted. “Anyway, it’ll spoil if Papa doesn’t come soon. Where is he?”

  “Waiting to make an entrance,” replied Graham, his face still expressionless, which left it open whether the remark had been malicious or just teasing.

  “I don’t find that awfully amusing, in front of strangers—visitors,” James said gruffly.

  “Amusing? Of course not: it’s merely true. And I like people who have a sense of occasion. Pop makes his exits and his entrances as if the spotlights were on him. What’s wrong with the grand manner?”

  James Loudron grunted, shaking his large head in a baffled, angry way, like a bull baited. It was another zoological simile, however, that vaguely stirred at the back of Nigel’s mind, as he studied Graham. Glancing at Clare, he saw that—in the telepathic way by which their minds occasionally communicated—she was with him. Her lips silently formed the words, “fruit bat.” Yes, that was what Graham reminded him of: triangular face, broad low forehead, sloping down to narrow chin: ears a little pointed: small, fleshy, pouted mouth. But did fruit bats have long noses? Graham’s was long, and its tip seemed likely at any moment to quiver with an animal sort of curiosity. An inquisitive nose.

  What he had said about making an entrance was abundantly justified in a few minutes. The door opened, and Dr. Piers Loudron stood inside it for a moment before advancing to greet his guests. Clare was instantly reminded of B.B.—the great Bernard Berenson with whom she had often stayed at Settignano: it was not only the pause at the door, and the ceremonious touch of being last to arrive, like an ambassador at a private party: the small, frail, spruce, upright figure: the neat, white beard; the hands loosely clasped in front of the black velvet jacket; the general air of urbane autocracy and an almost petit-maître elegance—all these brought back to Clare her beloved though exigent B.B.

  Dr. Piers came forward and took both her hands, gazing at her for a moment, his old eyes blue as lapis lazuli.

  “My dear, this is a very great pleasure to me. The genius I have long recognised; but I had not known that such beauty went with it.”