Kitabı oku: «Paul Temple and the Curzon Case»

Chapter One

‘Here’s to crime,’ Scott Reed said benevolently, raising his glass in a toast to the manifestly law-abiding company. ‘And long may it prosper.’

Paul Temple looked from his publisher to the circle of guests with drinks in their hands. ‘One eminent French criminologist has argued that there are no crimes, there are only criminals.’

‘That was Professor Saleilles,’ said Steve Temple deflatingly. She turned to Scott Reed. ‘Don’t worry, Scott. The French professor was much less scientific than your Dr Stern. He hadn’t done experiments with rats.’

The publisher looked startled. ‘I’m pleased to hear it.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the man whose book on crime was the excuse for the party. ‘Did Dr Stern do experiments with rats?’

‘Of course,’ said Steve. ‘He describes them in detail.’ She laughed teasingly. ‘I thought you always read the books you publish?’

Scott Reed sighed. ‘I don’t always understand them.’

Dr Albert Stern was not looking the part of a literary lion. He stood in the corner of the room watching the throng of journalists, criminologists and novelists with the apprehension of a man caught in lewd company. There was a clutch of thriller writers discussing their overseas sales, two policemen looking as if they were guarding the drink, and an assistant commissioner from Scotland Yard was sitting on the sofa reading The Psychology of Crime. Dr Stern had been told to chat up the booksellers, but the booksellers all seemed to know each other and they preferred to talk among themselves.

‘Do rats,’ Scott Reed asked after careful thought, ‘steal from each other and murder their wives?’

‘Only when they come from bad homes,’ said Steve.

She glanced at herself in the ornately carved mirror above the imitation Adam fireplace. She was wearing a sheer maxi dress with varying degrees of subtle see-through, printed in bands of colour that ranged through blues, reds and mauves. Captivating, Steve thought to herself. So much more restrained than the vulgarly fashionable girl Scott Reed employed as his publicity officer.

Steve half listened to somebody arguing that capital punishment gave added zest to a murder mystery, while her husband’s group discussed crime in general. She took a dry martini from a passing tray. As the only person in the room who had read the doctor’s book Steve felt a certain aloofness towards the gossip. She felt that Paul was being obtuse about it.

‘How can you write a book on the psychology of crime?’ he had asked three times on the way to the party. ‘There are so many different types of crime. I mean, you could write about delinquency or the aggressive impulse—’

‘He does,’ Steve had said patiently.

‘Criminals are not personality types,’ Paul had continued. ‘They’re people who’ve committed a crime, that’s all, by sudden temper or under provocation, under stress. Unless they’re psychopaths.’

‘That’s what he says,’ Steve had murmured.

‘Absurd!’

An elderly lady novelist was bearing down upon Steve with a flourish of her stole and the glint of a storyteller in her eye. Steve turned quickly to the police inspector standing beside her. ‘I didn’t realise crime was so dull,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re going to make many arrests this evening.’

Inspector Vosper was hurt. ‘I’m here in my private capacity,’ he protested. ‘Mr Temple said I should masquerade as a human being for one evening.’

‘What happens when the clock strikes midnight?’ Steve asked him.

Charlie Vosper looked every inch a policeman with his blue shirt and black tie, plain clothes and cropped grey hair. ‘I turn back into a pumpkin.’ He prodded a finger confidentially into Steve’s left arm. ‘What do you think of this psychology nonsense, eh? How many burglars do you suppose Dr Stein has caught red-handed?’

‘Dr Stern,’ she corrected him. ‘I don’t suppose he—’

‘Exactly. Would he recognise an embezzler if he stood next to one in a bank? Unless he was wearing a mask!’

‘He explains in his book—’

‘Books are all very well, Mrs Temple,’ the inspector said heavily. ‘But a policeman’s job is ninety per cent routine hard work and ten per cent knowing the criminal and pinning the rap on him. Dr Stein can’t teach me how to apprehend a murderer.’

‘That’s what he says,’ Steve murmured. ‘Dr Stern.’

‘Ridiculous!’

Steve sat wearily on the sofa by the assistant commissioner. ‘What do you make of it, Sir Graham?’ she asked. ‘Are you wishing Paul hadn’t dragged you along to this party?’

‘Not really, although the place is rather short on pretty girls. Only one attractive female in sight.’ Sir Graham Forbes closed the book and looked about the room. He was a dapper man with a bouncy, military manner, a military moustache and the steel blue eyes of a soldier. ‘The trouble with crime is that it doesn’t give the women a chance. Look at Paul over there, discussing penal reform with all those dreary men. He’s neglecting his wife.’

‘Bless you,’ said Steve, giving him a kiss on his bristling cheek.

The criticism was not altogether warranted. Paul was at the drinks table jostling among the journalists to get his glass refilled. He emerged eventually from the scrum and tottered across to the sofa.

‘Hello,’ said Paul. ‘You look like an oasis of sanity in this mad publishing world. Can I join you?’ He sat on the floor beside the sofa. ‘Oh dear. Crime is too serious a matter to be left to experts. Have you ever heard so much nonsense talked?’

‘Sir Graham,’ Steve explained, ‘has been regretting the absence of women from the ranks of crime. Down with male domination, that’s what we say.’

Paul laughed. ‘I’ll drink to that. Dr Stern forgot to mention sexual differences, didn’t he?’ He looked triumphantly at Steve. ‘I knew the book wasn’t thorough! And poor old Scott is beginning to wish he’d never published it. He’s threatening to sack his non-fiction editor for committing the firm to a book about rats.’

‘Rats?’ Inspector Vosper repeated nervously.

‘Yes, Scott is losing his grip. He assumed that because there were graphs and footnotes it was a scholarly work.’

‘Paul,’ said his wife disloyally to the others, ‘is another of those people who think that psychology is bunk.’

‘That’s not true! But I am an arts man, and I think that detection is something to do with logic and understanding people, having intuition and predicting individual behaviour.’

‘Hard work and attention to detail,’ Inspector Vosper muttered audibly.

‘Detection?’ said Sir Graham. ‘But the book isn’t about detection, is it?’

‘Of course not,’ said Steve.

‘Then what the devil are we doing here?’ Paul demanded indignantly. ‘Why did Scott ask me to bring along the cream of the British police force? I thought it was a handy manual on spotting crooks by the bumps on their heads. I wouldn’t have agreed to review it if I’d known.’

‘I suppose,’ the assistant commissioner said thoughtfully, ‘that we detectives understand crime, understand the psychology of crime if you like. But we don’t reach our understanding by experiments on rats, or by statistics. Charlie has understanding, but it’s not the kind of thing that can be described in a book. For instance, Charlie was telling me this evening of a case that he’s—’

Inspector Vosper coughed and straightened his shoulders.

‘What’s the matter?’ Sir Graham demanded. ‘I was going to tell Temple about those two boys—’

‘Yes, sir, that’s what I assumed. I wondered whether that would be discreet.’

‘Discreet?’ The military voice barked with exasperation. ‘Discretion is for inspectors, man! An assistant commissioner can be as indiscreet as he likes!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘If we were discreet we’d accept that no crime had been committed and get on with our work.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And don’t keep on saying yes, sir, like that. This is an informal occasion. Relax and look as though you’re enjoying the art of conversation. Sit down, man.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Vosper sat on a stiff-backed chair and tried to compose his stern features into a relaxed order. He was doing quite well until Steve began choking with laughter.

‘The point is that no crime has been committed,’ Sir Graham resumed. ‘At least, not that we know of. We’ve simply had a missing persons report, and that wouldn’t justify a full scale investigation. But Vosper thinks the situation should be looked into, and he’s usually right about these matters. A first class detective has a nose for anything not quite right.’

‘Really?’ said Paul with bland innocence. ‘Intuition, eh?’

‘What I call nose-ology,’ said Sir Graham. ‘But I looked it up in the index of Dr Stern’s book and he doesn’t mention it.’

‘Tell me,’ said Paul, ‘about these two missing boys.’

Vosper glanced at the assistant commissioner, then cleared his throat. ‘Do you know Dulworth Bay?’ he asked conversationally.

‘It’s a fishing village in Yorkshire,’ said Paul. ‘A beautiful spot. We know it well.’

‘Ah, so you probably know St Gilbert’s. It’s a minor public school. Quite a good one, so I’m told. They have a hundred boarders and fifty day boys. The headmaster is a Reverend Dudley Clarke.’

Steve found that her attention was straying. Charlie Vosper lacked the eye for detail which makes for a good raconteur. ‘I suppose,’ she said flippantly, ‘that Young Woodley has run off with the housemaster’s wife?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Vosper. ‘Who is Woodley?’

‘The missing boys are called Baxter,’ said the assistant commissioner. ‘They live with their father in a cottage on the Westerby estate. Their mother died about two years ago. Carry on, Charlie, tell them what happened.’

Vosper signalled to the publicity girl for another drink before he continued. He was a beer drinking man himself, but he was apparently reconciled to the rules being changed for one evening. He sipped a large whisky.

‘Three weeks ago last Tuesday,’ said Vosper, ‘Michael and Roger Baxter and another boy left St Gilbert’s after school and walked the mile or so to the Baxter cottage together. When they reached the cottage Michael Baxter remembered that he’d left a book at the school. It was a book he needed for prep that evening so he went back to fetch it. Left his brother and the other lad sitting on a fence in front of the cottage.’

He took another sip at the whisky. ‘Well, to cut a long story short, those two boys waited for nearly an hour, and then Roger Baxter decided to go back to school and look for his brother. The other boy went home. At seven o’clock that evening Mr Baxter, the father, became worried about the boys and went to the school. You can guess the story. The headmaster hadn’t seen the Baxter boys, they hadn’t gone back to the school, and they haven’t been seen since.’

‘I guessed it,’ said Paul. ‘And how did they get on with their father?’

‘Extremely well.’ Vosper nodded emphatically. ‘There was obviously nothing premeditated about this business, Temple. That was the first thing that interested me. They were perfectly normal teenagers, plenty of friends in the village, they were good at sport, interested in girls. Michael is seventeen and he’s particularly friendly with a Miss Maxwell. She’s a niece of Lord Westerby’s and lives at the Hall.’

‘Diana Maxwell?’ asked Paul.

‘Yes. I thought you might have heard of her. She writes poetry, although you wouldn’t think so to meet her. She looks quite normal.’

‘Charlie popped up to Dulworth Bay,’ explained the assistant commissioner, ‘semi-officially. The local inspector invited him up for a couple of days. That was when nose-ology came into the case. Charlie found that his nostrils were twitching.’

‘There may be nothing to it,’ said Vosper modestly. There was only one peculiar detail I could point to, and that may not be significant. But the Baxter boys share a bedroom; it’s a large, pleasant room, more like a playroom in some ways, and it overlooks the lane. I searched it, of course, read through the exercise books and the adolescent stuff that you’d expect to see. But the interesting oddity was a cricket bat.’

‘A boy’s proudest possession,’ said Paul Temple. ‘I remember how I kept mine oiled and supple—’

‘That’s the picture,’ said Charlie Vosper. ‘Young Roger Baxter is fourteen, and he’d collected the autographs of the St Gilbert’s first eleven on the blade of his bat. Struck me as a funny thing to do, but at my school we used cricket bats to hit each other with when we used them at all. So I made a check on the names, and there was one which I couldn’t account for.’ He smiled, pleased with himself. ‘It wasn’t even a genuine signature. Roger Baxter had written it there himself.’

‘What was the name?’ asked Paul.

‘The name,’ pronounced Inspector Vosper, ‘was Curzon.’

‘Just Curzon? No Christian name or initials?’

‘Just Curzon!’ Vosper placed his empty glass on a nearby table and watched it in the hope that it might be miraculously refilled. But it was every man for himself now and the journalists had the drink pinned at the far end of the room. ‘I wouldn’t claim that the name has any particular significance,’ he said. ‘Only that it was odd. I was looking for oddities by that time.’

‘You see, Temple,’ the assistant commissioner interrupted, ‘that’s nose-ology. Nobody at the school has heard of anyone called Curzon. Charlie asked the boys’ father and the name was completely unknown to him. Unknown to everyone else in Dulworth Bay. So what made Roger Baxter write it on his precious cricket bat?’

‘Charlie has a nose for detail,’ murmured Paul. ‘I wonder what Dr Stern would make of the story?’

Steve sighed and rose to her feet. ‘I know, don’t say it: his book is ridiculous.’

‘Nonsense,’ agreed Sir Graham.

‘Paul, are we going home? I’m tired and the noise in this room is giving me a headache. I can scarcely see who’s doing the shouting through this cigarette smoke. I need some fresh air.’

It was a quarter to ten. Paul took her arm and went in search of Scott Reed.

‘I’m fed up with cocktail parties!’ said Scott, staring at a burn and three whisky stains on the carpet. ‘I do hope it hasn’t been too boring, Temple. Goodbye, Steve, so good of you to have kept those detectives amused.’

Kate Balfour had long since gone home, so Paul pottered about in the kitchen producing the cocoa. He prided himself on his masculine independence. He could make cocoa without burning the milk and boil an egg without the yolk becoming solid. He took the drinks upstairs to the living room flushed with a sense of achievement.

‘I hope we didn’t leave too abruptly,’ he said as he put the tray on the table. ‘You didn’t even tell Dr Stern how much you admire his book.’

‘I didn’t admire it,’ Steve confessed. ‘But I did read the wretched thing, which is why I found the rest of you so irritating.’ She went across to the telephone answering machine on the shelf beside Paul’s desk. The large room was furnished in two halves separated by a step. Paul’s study was the half above the garage. ‘We left abruptly because I didn’t want you to start advising the police how to do their job. I know how they resent it—’

‘I thought Sir Graham was inviting my opinion.’

‘He may have been, but he’s only the assistant commissioner. Charlie Vosper is the man who does the work, and he didn’t want your advice. He’ll make Sir Graham pay for tonight’s little indiscretion, I could see it from his eyes.’

Steve smiled at the thought and absently pressed the button on the automatic answering machine. It whirred gently as the loop tape spun back to the beginning. ‘This is Paul Temple’s residence,’ said the recorded voice. ‘Mr and Mrs Temple are not available, but if you care to leave a message…’

Paul sank back into the armchair and drank his cocoa. He was beginning to hate the anonymous actor whose voice punctuated the messages; he always avoided switching on the machine until he was properly fortified against the day by three cups of coffee.

The telephone rang three times and the actor repeated his piece. ‘Gor,’ said a man in disgust, ‘I’ll write you a bloody letter.’ The telephone clicked, rang three times, and the actor spoke again. It was nerve-racking.

‘Damn,’ said a girl’s voice. ‘Oh well, this is Diana Maxwell. I needed to speak urgently to Mr Temple. Tell him I’ll ring him back, will you? I do hate all these mechanised gadgets!’

Paul rose to his feet in astonishment. ‘What did she say her name was?’

‘Exactly,’ said Steve. ‘Now isn’t that a coincidence?’ She spun the tape back to replay the message. ‘She’s the poet who seemed quite normal to Charlie Vosper.’

‘It isn’t a coincidence,’ Diana Maxwell explained when she telephoned the next day. ‘Inspector Vosper visited me on Friday and he mentioned your literary cocktail party. I think Westerby Hall brought out the democrat in him, but all his resentment was displaced on to your literary shindig. He said you would make him look like a penguin.’

‘Charlie Vosper has always walked like that,’ said Paul. ‘Why did you want to talk to me?’

‘I need your help, Mr Temple. Now that the police are searching for the Baxter brothers I think I’m in danger.’

‘I’m a busy man, Miss Maxwell,’ he said politely, ‘and I never interfere in the work of the police. Inspector Vosper is specially trained to protect people in danger.’ And the danger, Paul reflected, could not be imminent. She had waited three days to telephone him after the inspector’s visit, and a further twenty-four hours had passed before she rang back. ‘In danger from whom?’ Paul asked.

‘Someone by the name of Curzon.’

Paul walked round the desk and sat in his swivel chair. ‘Go on, Miss Maxwell.’ Full marks, he thought, to the inspector’s nose. ‘Tell me about Curzon.’

‘Not over the telephone. Do you know the Three Boars in Greek Street? I’ll meet you there at eight o’clock.’ She clearly did not expect any argument. ‘I’ll recognise you, but just for the record I’m wearing a blue suit, no hat; blue handbag. I’m fair, twenty-three and reasonably pretty.’

Paul smiled to himself. ‘I had formed that impression, Miss Maxwell. You know what Robert Browning said: “The devil hath not in all his quiver’s choice”—’

‘An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice,’ she completed. ‘But for your information, Mr Temple, it was Lord Byron.’

They had to park nearly two hundred yards from the Three Boars. Paul took his wife’s arm and walked through the neon-lit glitter of the Latin quarter. It lacked the vitality and charm, he reflected sadly, of the days when he had first got to know his London. The colour had been replaced by commercialism, it was no longer crime and vice for the simple pleasure of it. Or perhaps nostalgia was playing tricks with his memory.

‘This shouldn’t take us long,’ said Paul. ‘Where do you fancy eating afterwards?’

‘Wheelers?’ suggested Steve.

‘Clever me,’ murmured Paul. ‘I’ve booked a table for nine o’clock.’

‘Clever.’

The Three Boars was just another Soho pub, but the room upstairs was used for poetry readings and so the new literacy was centred on the bars. The barmaid with the flaxen hair and large bosom had been the inspiration of two sonnets, an ode to joy, and a somewhat clinical poem about sex. The clientele, Paul noticed as they went through to the saloon bar, looked conventional enough, except that the restrained young men in grey suits were probably known to the police, and the four scruffy characters shouting at each other in the corner were poets.

‘Blue suit, twenty-three,’ Paul said to himself. The girl by the door was pretty, but she didn’t look like a poet. She looked rather different. She waved.

‘I’m Diana Maxwell,’ she gasped. ‘It’s awfully good of you to come like this. I do appreciate—’

Paul bought the drinks while Steve took care of the small talk. He watched the girl in the mirror behind the bar. A striking figure, elegantly dressed, but for a niece of Lord Westerby surprisingly lacking in poise. She fiddled with her long blonde hair as she talked and kept glancing about the room.

‘Did anyone follow you here?’ she asked when Paul arrived with the drinks. ‘Did you notice a large red saloon car?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Paul. ‘Parking is so bad in London now that gangsters travel by taxi.’

The girl tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Temple. I’m not used to physical danger. Six weeks ago I was leading a perfectly ordinary life. That’s why I’m frightened. They’ve already tried to kill me twice, and sooner or later they’ll succeed.’

‘Now listen,’ said Paul with a laugh, ‘I know that two boys have vanished into thin air, but—’

‘You don’t know much about Curzon, do you?’

‘That’s true,’ Paul agreed. ‘That’s why I’m here, remember? You telephoned me and said you’d been talking to Charlie Vosper. We quoted Byron at each other.’ He broke off. Two men had come into the bar with that purposeful look of debt collectors in search of a defaulter. ‘So tell me about Curzon, Miss Maxwell.’

‘Of course,’ she said quickly. ‘It was good of you to come.’ The two men moved together into the centre of the room. ‘Five weeks ago when I was staying at Westerby Hall I came across—’ The larger of the two men took a pistol from his raincoat pocket and fired it from point-blank range. The girl stared in dismay before spinning backwards off her chair. A sudden cavity appeared in the side of her neck and filled with blood.

‘Get down, Steve, for God’s sake!’ Paul shouted.

The two men ran before the panic started. They were gone when Paul Temple reached the street. He caught a glimpse of a red saloon car driving away. People were screaming in the bar, several men spilled into the street, and when Paul returned he found a crowd staring down at the girl—

Steve was kneeling beside the girl’s head, dabbing ineffectually at the wound with a Kleenex. She looked up at Paul. ‘Diana Maxwell is dead,’ she murmured.

Paul picked up a broken sherry glass from the carpet. A pool of blood had been seeping towards it. ‘If this poor kid is dead,’ he said in bewilderment, ‘somebody has blundered. Because she is not Diana Maxwell.’