Death of a Beauty Queen Page 13

  She picked up her knitting and began to work at it. Bobby was still silent. She said:

  ‘They had one boy. When the child was seven or eight the wife died. Twenty years they had been married then. There had been another child before, but it died when it was a baby, Paul Irwin had strong feelings always – he loved, he hated, as he worked, with every ounce of energy and being that was in him. He hated – ah, hate’s a little word for what he felt – he hated the Building Society. He had made it, sweated his life and more for it to make it what it is to-day, and, by all that he had given it, he hated it. He hated the theatre – hate’s a tiny word, but there’s no other – for what it had done to his father. You see, he had loved his father. His wife he neither loved nor hated – she was just a convenience, a useful gag to stop a babbling tongue. His son he loved – but love’s a tiny word to use. For men like Paul, love and hate are words that are only shifting shadows of what they feel. Leslie’s like that, too, the same kind, only as yet he doesn’t know where his feelings belong – he’s just a mass of unrelated feeling.’

  ‘You must have thought a great deal about all this,’ Bobby said.

  ‘Young man,’ she answered, ‘when you have nothing else to do by day and by night – by night above all – but think and think, then presently you come to understand.’

  Bobby did not answer. He was musing on this strange, tragic tale of passion stifled, of love compelled, of a whole life controlled and forced to one determined end, of all that huge effort hidden behind what seemed the ordinary suburban life of a successful business man here, and there a commonplace calm domestic existence bounded by knitting and a picture paper and medicine from the doctor at the corner. How many, he wondered, of those one meets passing to and fro upon the daily routine of their affairs, could tell such tales of such fierce, prolonged endeavour, of such unending, desperate battle? How many old women wheezing in their armchairs by the fire as if they had never known life, as if the storms and trials of existence had passed them by entirely, had yet known such flame of thwarted passion as this one had endured?

  He seemed to see behind the dull and commonplace facade of ordinary, everyday life, a seething tumult of passion and of lost endeavour. He said presently:

  ‘Did your niece, did Leslie Irwin know all this?’

  ‘No. Only that there was some kind of family connection. It was that brought them together in the first place. But Paul wouldn’t hear of Leslie’s marrying Carrie. He had suffered so much, he had endured so much, I think he felt he could not bear that as well. Besides, we should have had to meet again.’

  ‘You think that was the reason...?’

  ‘It wasn’t only that. I think he was afraid Carrie would get Leslie into the theatre, and there was nothing he wouldn’t have done to stop that. He thought the theatre meant ruin and destruction – body and soul and everything. He knew what the theatre had done to his father, and he thought it might be the same with Leslie. You see, he had lived all his life in fear, never knowing what the next moment might not bring. No wonder, I think, he preached always a God of fear and anger.’

  Bobby looked at her.

  ‘You understand so well,’ he said.

  ‘Young man,’ she answered, ‘it is time I had my medicine. The glass is there just behind you, if you’ll pass it.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Financial Considerations

  There was not much more passed between them before there arrived Inspector Ferris, very bustling and efficient.

  With him, at first, Miss Perry seemed inclined to be more reticent, as if she had exhausted her emotions in outpouring to Bobby her memories of the past. To Ferris’s questions her answers were brief, serving merely to confirm what was already known. On one point she was very clear. She knew nothing of the supposed engagement to Claude Maddox, and did not much suppose Carrie had ever really intended to marry him, though it was quite possible she had accepted attentions meaning more to him than to her.

  ‘Carrie was like that,’ Miss Perry said. ‘She kept her own head so well she thought everyone else was the same.’

  ‘What about young Leslie Irwin?’ Ferris asked. ‘Anything between him and her?’

  ‘Couldn’t,’ Miss Perry answered shortly. ‘She knew Leslie was dependent on his father, and she knew there was nothing he wouldn’t have done to put a stop to that.’

  ‘Nothing, eh?’ repeated Ferris, and somehow that one word served to invest Miss Perry’s sentence with a strange and sinister significance. When she had used the same words before, they had seemed merely a conventional expression of extreme dislike, and so Bobby had accepted them. But now they seemed to mean much more as Ferris uttered his solitary word of comment, and Bobby looked startled and Miss Perry more than startled.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘Of course, I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Ever heard the old gentleman use threats? Or heard tell he had?’ Ferris persisted.

  ‘No. Yes. No. Not like that. I haven’t seen Paul – Mr Irwin I mean – not for twenty-nine years next March.’

  Ferris looked a little surprised at the precision of this statement, but did not comment on it. Miss Perry, a little flustered, went on talking rapidly, as if by a flow of words to wipe out all recollection of the unlucky phrase she had used.

  ‘I don’t believe,’ she declared, ‘Carrie meant to marry anyone – not just yet, that is. She knew what she wanted – Hollywood. A star she meant to be. Thought with her looks it would be easy. Thought I was a jealous, spiteful old maid when I told her looks and talent, yes, and opportunity, too, all together may lead nowhere. She wouldn’t believe all that’s merely the least you must have to join in the gamble, and whether they win for you or not depends on the card that turns up. She thought what qualified you for entry meant you were sure to win, and it don’t. It only gives you the right to try. But she didn’t believe that – they never do, not the young ones. And it wasn’t any man she wanted, but just two hundred pounds to pay for her fare to Hollywood, for a few smart frocks to take with her, and a little over to keep her in style while the fat contracts were being drawn up.’

  ‘She was a good actress, then?’ Ferris asked.

  ‘She didn’t even know what acting was,’ Miss Perry retorted. ‘She thought it was wearing a smart frock and turning up her nose at the audience. But she might have done well – she couldn’t act, but so few actresses can. She had looks, but she thought a winner in Brush Hill must still be a winner in Hollywood, where they tell me even the kitchen-maids in cheap restaurants have all been beauty queens at home. What would have counted, perhaps, is that she knew what she wanted and could keep her head – and that’s as rare as genius. None of the boys here ever got a thing from her – not so much as a kiss – nor would have till they had paid for it, cash down. And then as likely as not she would have bilked them – and never thought twice about it, either, for all she ever thought of was herself.’

  In answer to further questions Ferris put, she agreed that Leslie had called for Carrie, in a taxi, on the night of the Beauty Contest.

  ‘Must have cost the boy a pretty penny,’ she wheezed. ‘I don’t know how he got enough to pay for it the time she kept him waiting. And then, when she was ready, she came back for her crocodile bag, because she thought it would hold her things better than the little bead one. That took her another ten minutes.’

  Ferris made a careful note of this detail, and Miss Perry went on:

  ‘I always thought Leslie was the one that cared the most. But he hadn’t a chance with her. He doesn’t come into his money till he is twenty-five, and Carrie wasn’t going to wait that long. When you are young, three years seem like three centuries, but when you’re old they pass like three weeks or less.’

  ‘Then you don’t think Mr Maddox really cared much about her?’ Ferris asked, sharpening his pencil to make another note.

  ‘Yes, he did, but not like Leslie – not the same way. And it was Claude who was in the biggest hurry�
��. Leslie loved her the best, but Claude desired her the most. Only, once Claude had got her, he would have tired of her and gone off, while Leslie meant it for life.’ She was musing again now, talking more to herself than to them. ‘Leslie was slow combustion,’ she said, ‘burning slow but burning steady, and Claude was a fire in dry grass, blazing sky high while the fuel lasted – the fuel being always a failure to get just what he wanted just when he wanted it.’ She took up her knitting again. ‘A spoilt boy,’ she said. ‘Never denied anything either by himself or by anyone else, wanting what he wanted just when he wanted it, and for just as he long as he wanted it. A spoilt boy, that’s Claude Maddox, but he wouldn’t get what he wanted from Carrie, not till he had paid for it – and perhaps not then, unless he watched out very careful.’

  ‘There is Mr Beattie, too,’ Bobby observed.

  ‘A nice boy,’ she said. ‘I liked him best of all the three of them. He’s the artist type, like the men I used to know in father’s company – sudden and temperamental and generous, nothing mean or calculating about them. Do it first and think afterwards. But he was running after Miss Ellis. Carrie didn’t like that. Not that she cared two pins for Roy Beattie, but she hated to lose him or any boy. Insulted she felt when a boy looked at any other girl, because that meant she wasn’t quite all she thought.’

  ‘There’s not much against him,’ reflected Ferris, ‘except that he was on the spot – and someone had to be. Mr Sargent seems to have been a bit smitten, too. You knew Mr Sargent?’

  ‘A nasty little man,’ Miss Perry said. ‘The real stage-manager type. But he didn’t know Carrie. He was working up for a surprise. She was beginning to suspect he was just fooling her, and you weren’t safe with Carrie if she thought that. Play her a dirty trick and she would play you a dirtier. Spirit all right, she had – lots of spirit. Never cared what she did to get even.’

  Ferris thought that by now it was getting time to make his examination of Carrie’s room and papers. So he disappeared on that task, and soon, for it did not take him long, came back with some letters in his hand.

  ‘She was busy booking her passage to Hollywood all right,’ he said. ‘I found these put away in a drawer she had locked. One letter from one of the travelling agencies says they can complete all arrangements if she will call with remittance as arranged, when a berth will be reserved on the next steamer. All cut and dried, apparently, and there’s a rough note of her reply saying she would bring the money next day – that’s next day after she was murdered. So she evidently had the cash.’

  ‘But she hadn’t,’ protested Miss Perry. ‘I’m sure she hadn’t. How could she? She had it all worked out – two hundred pounds was what she needed, and where was she to get it from? She said as much to me herself only a week ago.’

  ‘Two hundred pounds?’ Ferris repeated, glancing at another paper he held. ‘Yes, that’s the figure jotted down here – at the bottom of the copy of the note to the agency, saying she was going to call with the money.’

  ‘But she hadn’t got it,’ Miss Perry persisted. ‘She can’t really have sent a letter to say she had. Why should she, when she knew she hadn’t?’

  ‘If she was really engaged to Mr Maddox, couldn’t he have promised it, or given her the money?’ Ferris suggested.

  Miss Perry began a scornful laugh that ended in a bad bout of coughing.

  ‘Not likely,’ she said, when she had recovered. ‘Give her two hundred pounds for her to go off to the other end of the world with? Not him – not Claude Maddox. Leslie Irwin might, but never Claude. Besides, he hasn’t got two hundred pence, let alone two hundred pounds, to bless himself with.’

  ‘I understood he came in for some money when he came of age?’ Bobby said. ‘And then he seems to have a good position in his firm.’

  ‘Yes, and a good salary,’ agreed Miss Perry, ‘but he’s in debt all round. The money he got when he came of age he spent long ago, making a splash,’ and Bobby remembered that was the third time he had heard this expression ‘making a splash’ used with reference to Claude Maddox. ‘Anything he has left is locked up in shares he couldn’t sell now except at a dead loss – he has the real gambler’s instinct, and he’ll never admit a loss because he is always so sure the luck will turn. So he always hangs on right to the end. No, he would never have given Carrie money to go and leave him, and, if he would, he couldn’t, for he hasn’t got it. Though he might have raised it by hook or crook to stop her going. It would have driven him half mad to think of her there, doing just what she liked, and him obliged to stop here. But not a penny would she have had to help her go.’

  ‘This young Leslie Irwin, could he have raised the money?’ Ferris asked.

  ‘Why, he hasn’t a penny,’ Miss Perry answered, quite amused. ‘As articled pupil, he gets no salary. He’s to follow his father as manager and secretary of the Building Society, but he isn’t even one of the staff yet. People think he is, because he is there so much and sits in his father’s office. But that’s only so he can get to know all the ins and outs of the business. The idea is if he was given a regular post, then it would have to be a junior appointment, and when Paul retires there would be others on the staff senior to Leslie who might try for the managership. But if Leslie’s brought in quite fresh, then it’s an outside appointment and not a promotion in the staff over seniors. And, to make sure, Paul sees to it Leslie has all the confidential books in his charge, and all the threads of the concern in his hands, so if they try to appoint anyone else, they’ll never get straight.’

  ‘Or Mr Beattie – could he have provided this money Miss Mears must have had from somewhere?’

  ‘He might,’ agreed Miss Perry doubtfully. ‘I don’t know, but it’s hardly likely, is it? – now he’s taken up with Lily Ellis?’

  ‘Or, Mr Sargent?’ Ferris asked.

  ‘Sargent?’ Miss Perry repeated. ‘Well, now you mention him, I expect he might have been willing to pay that much or more to get rid of Carrie. Carrie could be nasty when she wanted, and I know she was ready to let fly at him as soon as she was sure he had only been fooling her when he promised to get her an engagement. Yes, he might have raised the money – or promised it; he’s better at promising than doing.’

  ‘That might be a good line to follow,’ Ferris remarked thoughtfully. ‘It might be this way: Sargent promised her the money to keep her quiet. But he hadn’t got it. So he knew there was bound to be a row, and that’s why he arranged for her to have a room by herself, he could have a chance to quiet her down, or anyhow they could have it out by themselves. But, when the money wasn’t there, she rounded on him worse than he looked for, told him straight out she would give him away to his wife, and perhaps other threats as well – when a woman goes it,’ said Ferris profoundly, ‘she goes it. And he got mad, and the knife was lying there on the table same as that Ellis girl said, so he up and slung it at her, just to scare her, most like, and the point took her in the throat, and that was that, and murder done before you knew it. Take it from me, that’s how the whole thing happened.’

  ‘I don’t quite see why, if it was like that, her handbag should be missing,’ Bobby objected.

  ‘He thought there might be something in it compromising, so he grabbed it before he ran.’

  Bobby looked unconvinced. It was possible, of course. Even if there were no letters, Carrie herself might have written out a statement of their connection Sargent might not have wanted anyone to see. Yes, that was possible. He said:

  ‘What about the knife? Why should a knife like that be lying there? The staff have been questioned, and no one has ever seen any sort of knife in Sargent’s office or in his possession.’

  ‘No, we’ve got to trace the knife,’ Ferris admitted. ‘If we can, and if it’s Sargent it’s traced to, then, take it from me, it’s a case.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Knife Traced

  Miss Perry was a good deal impressed by this declaration. She evidently disliked Mr Sargent, and was quite ready to
believe ill of him.

  ‘Nothing of the artist in him,’ she said. ‘The pure manager type.’

  Then, too, the personality of Inspector Ferris had its effect – his brisk and confident manner, indeed, persuading her to that offer of some tea before they went which Bobby’s youth and supposed good looks had, contrary to Mitchell’s expectations, not succeeded in obtaining.

  Neither Bobby nor the inspector himself had had much time for rest or refreshment that day, nor any sleep the night before, but there was so much to do that Ferris was already phrasing a refusal when Bobby managed to whisper a reminder that Mitchell had said they were to try to get the old lady into as talkative a mood as possible. So Ferris turned his refusal into an acceptance, and Miss Perry, lifting herself with some difficulty from her chair, pottered about making the necessary preparations. While she was out of the room in the little kitchen across the landing that once had been a dressing-room when the house in more prosperous days had been occupied by a single family, Bobby repeated to Ferris the gist of the long story Miss Perry had told him. But Ferris was not much impressed.

  ‘Wasting our time listening to her, if all she can tell us is things that happened thirty years ago,’ he grumbled. ‘If I had known that was all, we wouldn’t have stayed. What we’re up against is what happened at the Brush Hill Central Cinema. You keep that in mind, my lad, and don’t go off on side-tracks about things that’s been stale thirty years. Stale and dead – dead,’ repeated Ferris, with a comprehensive wave of the arm.

  There is a phrase ‘Being dead, yet liveth,’ that at this flashed into Bobby’s mind. But prudently he did not utter it. Instead he went on to tell of his interview with Maddox, of the curious incident of the engagement-ring found in the street by someone giving that name of ‘Quin’ which had already appeared once before on the outskirts of events, and of the equally curious, but apparently unrelated, incident of the evident agitation Maddox had shown over Bobby’s interest in his display of challenge cups.