Frequent Hearses Read online

  Frequent Hearses

  Edmund Crispin

  On all the line a sudden vengeance waits,

  And frequent hearses shall besiege your gates.

  —To the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady

  Chapter One

  Taking Piccadilly Circus as your centre, draw a circle of radius eighteen miles, and you will find the major film studios—Denham, Elstree and the rest—dotted about its circumference. Long Fulton lies to the north-west. Should you wish to travel to Long Fulton from Oxford, your best plan is to entrain for London, and on arrival there set out afresh from Marylebone. The cross-country journey is prolonged and tedious, involving four changes—at stations of progressively diminishing size and increasing antiquity, so that the effect is of witnessing a dramatised History of the Railways in reverse—and, in the upshot, a ruinous, draughty single-decker motor-bus. It is advisable, as a general rule, not to attempt this. That Gervase Fen persisted in doing so may be attributed first to his innate perversity and secondly to the fact that the spring season commonly made him torpid, so that to meander through the burgeoning March countryside at twenty miles an hour was an occupation which consorted well with his mood. By getting up at six he could be at Long Fulton comfortably by ten, the time at which script conferences were usually advertised to begin. And since in actual fact (the making of films being what it is) they never began until ten-thirty or eleven, there was ample opportunity for him to drink coffee in the canteen or to rove through the congeries of decrepit-looking structures in which the brain-children of the Leiper Combine were nursed from undisciplined infancy up to the final cutting, dubbing and reduplication which preceded their début on this or that West End screen. The amusement which this afforded Fen was never more than tenuous. He was unable to regard British films as in any way indispensable to the Good Life, and his own temporary responsibility at the studios—which was to provide expert information about the life and works of the poet Pope—weighed very lightly on him in consequence.

  It was on the occasion of his third visit—a day of flying clouds and clear equinoctial sunlight—that he first became aware of the existence of the girl who called herself Gloria Scott.

  To all intents and purposes the studios had annihilated Long Fulton village, and there would have been a good deal of querulous correspondence about this in The Times had the evidence allowed anyone colourably to maintain that the process had been deleterious. It quickly proved, however, that regarded simply as a village there was little or nothing to be said in Long Fulton’s favour; its architecture was uniformly undistinguished and its lack of historical and literary associations such as to strike even the most resolute and exhaustive guide-books dumb. Moreover, it is certain that the villagers themselves would have opposed any attempt to protect them from the invasion of the Leiper Combine, for the building of the studios not only permitted them intoxicating glimpses of those deities (as persons interchangeable, but as stimuli sempiternal) to whose worship they addressed themselves twice weekly in the Regent at Gisford, but also enabled them, by sundry rapacious, underhand devices, to derive much monetary profit from the incursion. Like some uncouth Danaë, Long Fulton was seduced by the irresistible amalgam of gold and godhead. And to the condition of helotry which inevitably followed, the villagers were by nature and instinct most admirably suited. Left to their own exiguous devices, they had mismanaged Long Fulton to the point of virtual extinction. They were only too glad to surrender their independence to the studios, and would have stood out in a body against any scheme that proposed restoring it to them.

  The studios were as nearly in their midst as made no difference. They impended threateningly from behind the church—an extensive huddle of many disparate buildings which might have been the dolls’ houses of some careless giant-child, kicked together anyhow in a corner of the nursery. Fronting the road there was an attempt at a facade, but its failure to impart coherence to the structures behind it was so patent that aesthetically it would have been a great deal preferable if the attempt had not been made at all. The road itself was decimated by a weight of traffic for which it had never been designed, and its air of dilapidation was echoed wherever you looked. The pervasive whitewash badly needed renewing; bomb damage (to the very last, German Intelligence had clung tenaciously to the conviction that the studios were an arms factory of some description)—bomb damage had been patched up rather than properly repaired; and the great stages, towering monolithically above the other buildings, looked quite capable of folding up at the advent of a high wind. For all this, economic considerations—the industry is for ever in the toils of one financial crisis or another—were no doubt responsible; but the general untidiness of the scene was accentuated by the surrounding estate, which was cluttered up with realistically wrecked aeroplanes, half-demolished plywood cottages, immense blue sky-screens, mystifying pyramids of sand, small lighthouses and all manner of other miscellaneous bric-a-brac.

  Nor were matters very much improved when you got inside. There were large zigzag cracks in the walls; flakes of whitewash were liable to detach themselves from the ceilings and settle in your hair; dust was omnipresent and cleanliness doubtful; of the multiplicity of telephones which constituted the principal furnishings, at least a third were perpetually out of order. Moreover, the topography of the place was so irrational and obscure as to make it seem inchoate. It possessed, certainly, a few permanent landmarks such as the Music Department and the Script Department, but for the rest it appeared to be made up of numerous small, bare rooms, identically furnished with chairs, a table and the inevitable telephone, which were employed for official and unofficial confabulations and could be distinguished one from another only by a surrealist system of digits and letters of the alphabet; and to locate any particular one of these unaided was a considerable enterprise. More than anything else, perhaps, the studio lacked a focus. A decisive single main entrance might have provided this, but in fact there were three main entrances, severely egalitarian in their amenities and with nothing to choose between them except that one of them gave access to the place where you wanted to arrive and the other two did not; and in none of them was there anywhere where enquiries could be made and some species of orientation established. To the mere stranger it was all vastly confusing.

  Mere strangers, however, were few and far between; for obvious reasons, the organisation did not encourage their presence. And it was to be presumed that Mr. Leiper’s employees, set in their habitual orbits and pursuing their familiar avocations, could find their way about all right. Certainly they were a diverse community: innumerable technicians, meditating strikes; stenographers with impeccably dressed hair, as instinct with poise as the heroines of a woman novelist; camera crews; continuity girls; youngish directors; well-shaven, lounge-suited producers and executives, rather older; actors and actresses in their make-up; “extras”, swathed in boredom as in a garment; canteen staff; porters and messengers. By their united labours romance would come to Wigan, to West Hartlepool overmastering adventure, to Birmingham and Aberystwyth an anodyne against the pains of living. Hand clutched in sticky hand, head against shoulder, Jane and George, Sally and Dick would for three hours at least snatch immunity, by the studios’ contriving, from war and the rumours of war, from domestic contention and public strife, from tedium and malice and routine and the struggle to keep alive… Long Fulton, in short, was a notable well-head of our most potent latter-day religion; and this being so, some degree of hubris might reasonably have been expected of its acolytes. Yet these studio people were not, on the whole, vainglorious. Like Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, they were acutely conscious of the more squalid defects of that to which they ministered, and were therefore constantly surprised—if not, indeed, actively repelled
—by the homage which it so unfailingly exacted from the millions of its worshippers. Only rarely did the glamour of “a job with films” go to anyone’s head—and though the girl who called herself Gloria Scott may have suffered from such delusions of grandeur, she had the excuse of being young, and was in any case a person of very little consequence. Her death, and the appalling consequences which followed it, was perhaps shocking precisely because she was so unimportant; it was as if a bomb had gone off in an area confidently scheduled by the authorities as completely safe…

  The bus from Gisford went no farther than “The Bear”, a failing hostelry at the opposite end of the village from the studios. From that point, then, Fen was obliged to walk and on the morning in question he was negotiating the main street, with a copy of The Ambassadors held open in front of his face, when a small saloon car pulled up beside him.

  “The studios,” said a voice from within it. “Can you tell me, please, if I’m right for the studios?”

  Half of Fen’s attention lingered on the unconscionable Strether; with the other half he delivered an affirmative. He was about to expand this with specific directions when an exclamation checked him.

  “Professor Fen!” said the car’s occupant cordially. “This is a very pleasant coincidence indeed. How are you?” And at this Fen shook himself hurriedly free of the stupor which the prose of Henry James invariably induced in him, stooped, and peered in at the car window.

  Sitting benignantly at the wheel, like a well-disposed gnome, he saw a small, neat, dapper man of between fifty and sixty, with greying hair, a round, clean-shaven pink face, and innocent blue eyes. A slender cheroot was in the corner of his mouth; a grey Homburg hat surmounted him; shining brown shoes were on his feet. You would have put him down, perhaps, as a prosperous and engaging commercial traveller with mild pretensions to culture—and it may be that some such effect was what he aimed at, for the habit of camouflage had often been useful to him in dealing with the complexities of metropolitan crime. But his appearance expressed his true nature faithfully enough: he was in fact, and without affectation, tidy-minded, disarming, unaggressively cultivated; and although these traits were undeniably of assistance to him in his work at New Scotland Yard, he had always successfully resisted the temptation—a natural enough temptation in the circumstances—to gild the lily by exaggerating them into a pose.

  “Humbleby,” said Fen, enlightened; and extended a hand which Humbleby moved flaccidly up and down inside the car. “Two years, is it, or three?”

  “A little less than two, I fancy.” And Humbleby nodded approval of his own acumen. “The Sanford affair was in September of 1947. Have you been back there since that time? I understand that you didn’t get into Parliament after all. What a good thing. Have you heard that Myra…”

  For a minute or two they gossiped about the case which had brought them together. You may remember it—it was the business of the ex-prostitute who was poisoned through the post. Then Fen, suddenly tiring of these reminiscences, said:

  “But why are you going to the studios? Police business?”

  Humbleby nodded. “Of a sort. This is what you once, I believe, called a ‘criminological holiday task’. But nothing very sensational—as far as you can tell at the moment… I am right for the studios, I suppose?”

  “Those are they.” Fen pointed. “Those fanciful white buildings behind the trees. The gate’s about two hundred yards along on the left. I’m on the way there myself, so you can give me a lift.”

  “By all means.” Humbleby opened the car door, and Fen climbed in. “What’s that you’re reading?”

  “The Ambassadors.”

  “Narcotic,” said Humbleby. “I always feel that Henry James ought to be dealt with in the Dangerous Drugs Act, and perhaps used in childbirth as an alternative to trilene… Here we go, then.”

  Humbleby had no talent for cars, and they moved off in spasms along the almost deserted street. The sun shone down on them with impersonal benevolence, and a dog, misdoubting their intentions, barked tremulously at them from the kerb. Humbleby put out his tongue at it as they passed.

  “And you,” he said, “—are you just paying a visit to the studios, or are you professionally occupied there?”

  “The latter.” Fen stiffened as they approached a bend in the road, and did not relax until again they were safely round it. “But only as casual labour. I’m acting as literary adviser in connection with a film they’re making.”

  “Bless us,” said Humbleby. “A film about what?”

  “It’s based on the life of Pope.” The final words of this statement were drowned out by an imperious, and apparently quite disinterested, blast on Humbleby’s horn. “Based,” Fen reiterated irritably, “on the life of Pope.”

  “The Pope?”

  “Pope.”

  “Now which Pope would that be, I wonder?” said Humbleby, with the air of one who tries to take an intelligent interest in what is going forward. “Pius, or Clement, or—”

  Fen stared at him. “Alexander, of course.”

  “You mean”—Humbleby spoke with something of an effort—“you mean the Borgia?”

  “Don’t be so ridiculous, Humbleby,” said Fen. “Do you really imagine they’ve called in a Professor of English to instruct them about the Borgias? No, I mean the poet, of course.”

  “That was my first thought”—Humbleby was aggrieved—“but naturally I rejected it out of hand. There’s nothing in Pope’s life that anyone could possibly make a commercial film of.”

  “So one would imagine.” Fen shook his head gloomily. “None the less, a film is in fact going to be made. And the reason for that—”

  He checked himself in order to flourish a mandatory finger at the studio gate, where they had now arrived. They swerved in past the disregard of a gatekeeper in a sort of sentry-box. Passes were supposed to be shown, but except on the days when extras were being interviewed this rule was seldom enforced. “The reason for that,” Fen repeated doggedly, “is as follows. A few months ago Andrew Leiper died, and his brother—”

  But Humbleby was not attending. Instead, he was searching for a gap in the line of expensive-looking cars—monuments, many of these, to an involved scheme for hoodwinking the Inland Revenue Department which were parked, nose inward, along the front of the studios. Presently he found one and scraped into it.

  “Yes?” he said encouragingly. “You were saying?”

  “I was saying that this company used to be owned by a man called Andrew Leiper. Andrew Leiper died recently, however, and the company, along with his other interests, was inherited by his elder brother Giles.”

  And Fen pointed to the facade above them, where a group of workmen were engaged—and in their leisurely way had been engaged for the past three weeks—in substituting, in the great gilt-letter sign ANDREW LEIPER FILMS INC., the word GILES for the word ANDREW. “Si monumentum requiris…”

  “Just so.” Humbleby switched off his engine, removed the cheroot from his mouth, and examined the end of it attentively. “But as to the immediate relevance of the situation you describe—”

  “We’re coming to that… Now, Giles’s sole claim to distinction is that he’s a literary crank. He believes, for instance, that the Earl of Rutland wrote Shakespeare’s plays (with the exception of The Tempest, which he ascribes to Beaumont and Fletcher), and he’s published a nasty little book which purports to prove it. He believes that Dryden was impotent, and that incestuous relations between Emily and Bramwell were responsible for Wuthering Heights. In fact, I’m inclined to think that he believes that it was Bramwell, and not Emily, who actually wrote Wuthering Heights… But all that’s by the way. The point is that Giles Leiper has ideas about Pope, too. Do you know the Ode to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady?”

  “Dr. Johnson,” said Humbleby with the cautious deliberation of one who treads slippery conversational ground, “interpreted it as an apologia for suicide.”

  “So he did. And—”

 
“But I like it,” said Humbleby, suddenly enthusiastic. “I like it very much indeed. ‘What beck’ning ghost,”’ he intoned dramatically, “‘along the moonlight shade Invites my something something something glade. ‘Tis she!—but why that bleeding—”’

  “Please, please.” Fen fished a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his coat and lit one. “Your recollection of the piece seems to be very indistinct. I’d better explain what it’s about. It concerns—”

  “There’s not the least necessity—”

  “It is an Elegy to a girl who has killed herself as a result of being—um—callously deserted by her husband. The poet—”

  “I remember it very clearly,” said Humbleby. “Very clearly indeed.”

  “The poet, in addition to deploring this situation, announces his belief that vengeance will overtake not only the husband, but the whole of his family as well.”

  “‘While the long funerals,”’ chanted Humbleby in solemn antiphon, “‘darken all the way.’”

  “Blacken all the way, blacken… The girl may have been a Mrs. Weston, by birth a Miss Gage. But that’s conjectural. The poem was almost certainly a mere imaginative exercise, and there’s not the smallest evidence that Pope was in any way personally involved. Which brings us to Giles Leiper.”

  “Brings us, at long last, to Giles Leiper.”

  “Leiper believes, along with his other fatuities, that Pope was personally involved. Not long ago, in fact, he wrote an article in some tawdry journal or other stating his conviction that Pope had had an affair with this girl, and that that was why he was so upset about her death. ‘Are we to understand,’” Fen quoted with repugnance, ” ‘that a poem as deeply felt as this was no more than a callous exercise in versification? Is it not much more in accordance with our knowledge of poets and poetry to assume that Pope was intimately interested in the lady?’”

  “Well, isn’t it?” said Humbleby, taken genuinely unawares.