The Worm of Death Read online

  “I can just hear you doing it.”

  For some time, after Wright had left and they had finished their bacon-and-egg supper, Nigel and Clare talked over the mystery of Dr. Piers Loudron. Clare’s fingers worked on a lump of clay they were shaping, of their own volition, into a spout-muzzled horse, while she gave all her attention to the problem Nigel worried at.

  “Let’s forget for the moment,” he was saying, “the question of murder v. suicide. Take the hypothesis that it was in his own house he killed himself or was killed. How could the body have been conveyed to the river? He was frail and weighed little, but one can’t imagine X carrying him there in a sack or trundling him in a wheel-barrow: too dangerous, even allowing for the fog: too bizarre altogether.”

  “So he must have been conveyed in a car.”

  “Exactly. But Henderson’s chaps have been over Dr. Piers’s Daimler and Dr. James’s Morris with all the resources of science, and they found no trace of the body’s having been carried, either inside the cars or in their luggage boots.”

  “Yes, but what trace would they be able to find? X could have bandaged the wrists, so there’d be no bloodstains left; and anyway he’d have stopped bleeding by then.”

  “Hair,” said Nigel. “You couldn’t bundle a body into a boot or a back seat without rubbing off a hair or two.”

  “Not if you’d wrapped that tweed overcoat of his round the head?”

  “Ye-es. That might work.”

  Clare’s eyes lit up. “No, I’ve got it! Something much simpler. If X used Dr. Piers’s Daimler and set the body beside him on the front seat, it wouldn’t matter if the police found hairs there—or any other traces of him except blood. You’d expect to find them in a car he was constantly using.”

  “Good. You may have hit it. The only alternative I could think of is that X borrowed for the job one of the cars that are parked every night in Burney Street. But, unless he’s a professional car thief, he wouldn’t have been able to break into one of them without causing damage, which the owner would have reported to the police. Well then, let’s imagine X going off with the body in the front seat of the Daimler. Where would he take it?”

  “In that fog, he’d not drive far, surely. The nearest point on the river is by the pier.”

  “But you can’t drive right up to the river wall there. You’d have to hump the body nearly a hundred yards, past the Cutty Sark.”

  “Well then, the next nearest point is Park Row, the road that runs past the east end of the Naval College. X could stop the car on the opposite side from the Trafalgar Tavern, and he’d only have to take about ten paces to the waterside.”

  “Yes. There’s a street lamp there. But in that fog it’d be fairly safe, unless someone walked out of the Trafalgar Tavern just as X was dumping the body in the river,” said Nigel slowly. “It might be safer still to drive down one of the streets which lead to the river farther east. The wharves would be absolutely deserted, I should think, at that time. There’s Lassell Street to the west of Harold Loudron’s house, and Pelton Road which runs down just east of it to Lovell’s Wharf. All this presumes special knowledge on X’s part.”

  “Of Greenwich?”

  “Yes, and of the tide-table. It’d have been unwise to throw the body off the river wall at any time except high water or the top of the ebb, if you wanted it to be pulled out from the shore.”

  “But if X merely wanted to get rid of the body—so that it wasn’t found in the house?”

  “Then he’d surely not have needed to take it as far as the river. There’s all that waste ground along Burney Street, for instance. No, the fact that the body was thrown in the river suggests that X wanted its discovery to be put off as long as possible.”

  “So that it might be difficult to prove how Dr. Piers died?”

  “Exactly. And if the ship’s screw had cut off his arms instead of his legs, we should never have known how he died.”

  Clare Massinger stretched out her legs on the sofa and gazed at the lofty ceiling. “If it was murder, all I can say is that X was very lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  “To get a combination of thick fog and high tide at the right time, and the several members of the family dispersed in different rooms.”

  “Lucky or patient. He may have waited a long time for that combination of circumstances: including Mrs. Hyams’s confinement, which kept Dr. James out of the house for several hours that night.”

  “I suppose you’re safe to assume he died that night, or in the small hours of the morning?”

  “Pretty safe, if it was in his own house he died. But there’s no absolute certainty that he did. He may have had what Harold calls a ‘brainstorm,’ and wandered out after the effects of the sedative had worn off, and somehow remained in concealment for a period until—— But it’s so unlikely, one can dismiss it. No, the other possibility I have to consider is that he left the house that night, perfectly in his right mind——”

  “But having changed his suit, shirt and underclothes,” Clare interrupted. “Why?”

  “Yes, I know that sounds wildly improbable, but pass it over. It couldn’t have been an emergency call, for his doctor’s bag was not taken. The only thing I can imagine taking him out of the house on a foggy night like that would be an appeal from one of his family. Harold Loudron did ring him up before dinner: Dr. Piers was heard to say it could wait till to-morrow. Well, he might have changed his mind——”

  “After sleeping on it for several hours with the aid of a barbiturate?” asked Clare sceptically.

  “. . . might have changed his mind and gone along to Harold’s house.”

  “But surely, at his age, he wouldn’t? He’d have rung Harold and discussed whatever it was on the telephone, or asked him to come over to Crooms Hill.”

  “Dr. Piers was not too old, I suspect, to act on an impulse—irrationally, even. Well, he walks along to Harold’s house——”

  “Remembering to take a cut-throat razor with him.”

  “Oh, blast you, Clare! Let me finish building my house of cards before you blow it down. There’s no evidence that the missing razor had not been removed from its case days or weeks before.”

  “All right. So the old man gets to Harold’s house, and then what?”

  “If it turns out that Harold’s business affairs are rocky, and if his father refuses him the money needed to straighten them out, Harold has a strong motive for killing him. And what’s more, he has an extremely convenient window, right above the water, from which to jettison the body.”

  “There’s a king-size snag in that,” said Clare.

  “Oh, there is, is there?”

  “Don’t be grumpy. Suppose Harold is in such a desperate hurry for money, surely he’d not dispose of his father’s body in such a way that it might not be found for weeks? He’d want to borrow on the strength of his expectations from the old man’s will immediately. And anyway, what’s the fair Sharon doing while Harold is cutting his father’s arteries—encouraging him with high-pitched cries?”

  “You’re impossible to-night, love. Actually, I suspect she was out on the tiles that night. Harold said something when I was talking to the family this morning, which—and he got very hot under the collar when Walter Barn suggested that Dr. Piers might have gone to see him and Sharon that night. Still, I dare say it’s all got some fairly innocent explanation. Perhaps we’d better stick to the Daimler——”

  When Chief Inspector Wright turned up after breakfast the next morning, Nigel at once said to him:

  “Before you start interrogating the suspects, I think it might be worth while getting one of your chaps to make inquiries in the Trafalgar Tavern and in the houses at the north end of Pelton Road and possibly Lassell Street.”

  “And what is he to inquire about?” asked Wright, with an exaggeratedly blank expression.

  “Whether anyone saw Dr. Piers’s Daimler standing at the river end of the street on the night he disappeared.”

  Wri
ght’s poker-face registered a faint stir of emotion.

  “Interesting you should say that. I had a man interviewing the residents of the Trafalgar Tavern last night. One of them—he’s been away for the last week and only just returned—remembered seeing a Daimler which he recognised as the doctor’s, at about 11.15 that night. This gentleman had popped out to give his dog a bit of relief before going to bed. The car was standing, empty, on the opposite side of the street, about ten yards from the waterfront. Our witness strolled across the road and all but bumped into the car, the fog was so thick. And now,” added Wright, “would you mind telling me just how you lighted upon this information?”

  “By theorising on insufficient facts,” Nigel replied.

  CHAPTER VII

  Chain Reactions

  AS THE POLICE car drew up outside the Loudrons’ house, the front door opened and a body flew out into the paved forecourt, followed by a camera which smashed itself against the iron railings. Wright and Nigel hurried through the wrought-iron gate. A dazed little man, with blood pouring from his nose and a vicious, frightened look in his eye, picked himself up.

  “He’s gone mad,” the man panted. “I’ll have the law on him! He can’t treat the Press like this.”

  Wright and his sergeant began dusting the man off. Nigel rang the front-door bell: then, hearing sounds of violence from within, moved to the window of the study. Looking in, he saw Walter Barn in the process of beating up a fattish man a good head taller than himself. Rebecca Loudron, her back to a book-case on the far side of the room, was watching the massacre with an expression in which horror and a fascinated excitement unpleasingly blended. If Walt had ever heard of the Queensberry Rules, he had forgotten what he had heard. Slipping a wild right swing, he drove his fist into his opponent’s belly, well below the belt; then, while the large man caved forward, making a hideous sound as if his guts were falling out of his mouth, Walt clubbed him across the cheek with his right, and followed it up with a brutal kick at the knee-cap. The man sprawled backwards across the desk. Hammering at the window, Nigel at last attracted Rebecca’s attention. She ran out of the room to open the front door. Nigel rushed in, followed by Wright, the sergeant and the Press photographer.

  The large man was rolling on the floor now, whimpering and retching, forearms cradling his head at which Walt was kicking. In a moment the frail-looking Wright had Walter Barn’s powerful arm in a lock that made the young painter bend forward, gasping with pain. He pushed him down into a chair, sent Rebecca scurrying for iodine and dressings, helped his sergeant to lift Walter’s victim on to the sofa, turned back to his assailant.

  “I am a police officer. What’s been going on here?”

  Walter Barn’s demoniac fit had passed away as suddenly as a summer hail-storm. He lay back in the chair, his speedwell-blue eyes dancing.

  “These two bastards were making a nuisance of themselves. They insulted Becky.”

  “That’s a damned lie,” exclaimed the little photographer in an aggrieved, adenoidal whine. “We were only doing our duty. We asked for an interview with Miss Loudron, an exclusive, and this maniac here——”

  “Asked for an interview! You lousy little gutterpress lapdog! What you mean is, you and that fat slob on the sofa there got your foot in the door, pushed your way in past my fiancée, started photographing this study, badgered my fiancée for what you call a ‘story’——”

  “You’ve no call to use violence. D’you realise you’ve broken a valuable camera?”

  “I’m delighted to hear it. Your sort make me sick. You think that, because you’re in the pay of some revolting Press-lord, you’ve a right to force your way into anyone’s house and exploit people’s grief to cook up a tasty story for your sickening readers——”

  “The public,” mouthed the large man, who had painfully gathered himself into a sitting position on the sofa, “has a right to be informed on all matters of general interest. You’re going to be sorry for this, young man, whoever you are. We shall deal with you.”

  “God damn you and your public! Hasn’t the private individual any rights?” Walter Barn, quivering now like a taut wire, spoke with such violence that the fat man shrank back and Wright interposed.

  “All right. Break it up.”

  “What makes me vomit is the bloody sanctimonious hypocrisy of muck-rakers like that hero trembling on the sofa there, telling us about their sacred duty to provide dollops of sewage for the moronic millions, and——”

  “I said, break it up,” Wright’s voice was cold as a chisel. Rebecca came in with a first-aid box. “Will you attend to him?” said Wright.

  “I wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole,” answered Rebecca, her nostrils wide with distaste.

  “And you a doctor’s daughter!” mocked Walter.

  “Sergeant, attend to this man. You’re a great nuisance, all of you,” Wright equably continued. “Wasting my time with your squabbles like this.”

  “Are you in charge of the case now?” the large man asked him, while the sergeant applied iodine and a lint dressing to his split cheek. “Anything fresh broken? Can you give me a story?”

  “Smut-hound still on the trail,” Walter remarked.

  “Keep your wit to yourself,” said Wright. “I’ll take statements from you two representatives of the Press, then you will leave. I’m busy to-day.”

  Ten minutes later, Nigel, Wright and the sergeant were alone in the study with Walter Barn.

  “God-damned liars,” said the young painter. “They did push their way in and they did molest Becky.”

  “How do you know? According to your statement, you did not arrive till later.”

  “Becky told me when I came in. And lucky I did. She was terribly upset.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “Through the door.”

  “Now look, Mr. Barn. I’ve no time to waste on childish repartee. You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “Oh, all right. I let myself in. I have a key.”

  “How long have you had it?”

  “Becky gave me one—oh, a month or two ago.”

  “Right. Now we’re going back to the night Dr. Piers Loudron disappeared. I understand you visited this house before dinner?”

  “What the nobs call ‘dinner,’ yes. About 6.30. I chatted with Becky in the kitchen for half an hour or so: then I walked back to my humble abode.”

  “Had you any special reason for visiting Miss Loudron that night?”

  “Just lerv, Inspector. Can’t seem to keep away from the girl.”

  “You walked a mile, in a thick fog, and a mile back, simply to have a chat?”

  “Beneath a rugged exterior, I’m ever so romantic.”

  Chief Inspector Wright, appearing satisfied, dropped this subject. Nigel had often witnessed his interrogations, but was still fascinated by Wright’s technique—a technique of suspect-tapping, one might call it; as a man might move round a room, tapping the walls for the hollow sound which would betray a hiding-place, so Wright probed here and there at the surface of the person he was interrogating, his senses alert for a suspect’s relaxing of tension when he moved away from a dangerous area, a tightening of tension when he returned to it. Had Mr. Barn ever been in the surgery?—no. Did he remember any more of the telephone conversation between Dr. Piers and Harold Loudron than he had told the D.D.I.?—no. Could he drive a car?—probably, but he’d only ridden motor bikes so far. Would he make any objections to having his fingerprints taken?—none at all.

  “Did you ever quarrel with the deceased?”

  “No. He just froze me off—or tried to.”

  “Because you wished to marry his daughter?”

  “Yes. He treated me like something the cat brought in.”

  “So Miss Loudron had to do the fighting?”

  Pause. Walter Barn’s eyes looked wary. “I don’t get you.”

  “She had serious quarrels with her father, over you?”

  “Well, I—yes, she did.”<
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  “And a particularly violent one the evening he disappeared—not long before you turned up?”

  “Who the hell told you that?”

  “Information received,” Wright blandly answered. Nigel sat up. This was news to him. Or was the inspector flying a kite?

  “If you knew it already, why ask me?” said Walter.

  “We have to check and counter-check every bit of evidence. Is it true?”

  “There was a quarrel that day. I don’t know how violent. I wasn’t in attendance.”

  “But surely you do? That’s why you walked over here in the fog. Miss Loudron had telephoned you. She needed your help, your comfort, urgently?”

  The painter made no reply, and Wright did not press him. Instead, he put a few dummy questions about Dr. Piers—had Mr. Barn felt him to have been apprehensive, or unusually depressed, recently?—no: he wouldn’t know anyway. With the perfunctory air of one asking a merely routine question, Wright said:

  “So you left the house that night about seven, and walked straight home? You didn’t go out again?”

  Nigel, for whom Walter Barn’s small round head perched on his square shoulders had always seemed like a stone ball on a manorial gate-pillar, now suddenly saw it as a ball not cemented there but precariously balanced, as if a puff of wind might roll it off.

  “No, I didn’t go out again.” There was a queer intonation, a sort of smirk, in Walter’s voice.

  “You were here all the time?” put in Nigel, so unobtrusively that it was barely audible.

  “That’s what I’m—” Walter stopped, and almost instantly went on—“what I’m telling you is, I went back to my studio and had supper and looked through a Piero della Francesca book Becky had lent me, and then I went to bed.”

  “You live alone?” asked Wright, his eyes boring into Walter.

  “Yes.”

  “So we have to take your word for it that you went home and stayed there all night?”