Frequent Hearses Read online

  “No, it isn’t. And even if it were, there’s not, in this case, the smallest justification for imagining that Pope’s connection with the girl was anything but platonic… Anyway, it’s this supposititious affair that the film is chiefly about—though a lot of other things come into it, of course.” Fen considered these, not without pleasure. “There’s Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. There are Addison and Swift—Swift is depicted as walking about the country all day, writing Gulliver, thinking erotic thoughts about Stella, and having little preliminary or proleptic fits of madness. There’s also, and somewhat anachronistically, Bolingbroke.”

  Humbleby chuckled. “And Dryden and Wycherley,” he said, “and Handel and Gay and Queen Anne. I mustn’t miss this film. How far has it got?”

  “It’s not on the floor yet.”

  “On the floor?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry: their damnable jargon is infectious. I mean that they haven’t actually started making it yet. We’re still at the stage of script conferences.” And Fen glanced at his watch. “There’s one this morning—which is why I’m here.”

  Humbleby threw the end of his cheroot out of the window. “You’re not in a hurry, I hope?”

  “Not specially, no. Before I go, tell me what you’re doing here. If it isn’t confidential, that is.”

  “No, it isn’t confidential.” At the reminder of his mission a certain sombreness had invaded Humbleby’s bland countenance. “And knowing these people, you may possibly be able to help me.”

  “A crime?”

  “Suicide is a crime, yes. But there’s nothing special about this one, except that the poor wretch was so very young, and thought better of it at the last moment—though too late to save herself…” And Humbleby braced himself, as a man braces himself when confronted with a necessary but wholly disagreeable task. “Tell me,” he said, “have you ever come across a girl called Gloria Scott?”

  A group of cleaners—stolid, morose, elderly women—drifted in at the studio gate; their voices, exchanging laborious witticisms with the gatekeeper, rasped unpleasantly through the limpid morning air. The men on the scaffolding had ceased work and were recouping their energies with cold tea. A distant succession of reverberating bumps suggested that someone was loading or unloading balks of timber. And as Humbleby spoke, the shadow of a great cloud curtained the studios from north to south, so that, by contrast, the low hills where the sun still shone glittered like polished metal.

  “Gloria Scott?” Fen echoed. “No, I’m afraid the name doesn’t convey anything to me.”

  Humbleby was absently fingering the lapel of his light-grey overcoat. “I’m not clear,” he said, “as to whether she actually worked here or not. But it was from here that Miss—um”—he consulted with his memory—“Miss Flecker rang up to identify her. Perhaps you know Miss Flecker?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Fen restively. “And all this means nothing to me, nothing. Explain, please.”

  “You’ve seen this morning’s paper?”

  “The Times and the Mail only.”

  “The Mail had it in. A photograph of this girl, with a request for identification.”

  Fen produced the paper from his pocket and hunted through it. “There,” said Humbleby, pointing.

  The photograph was of a pretty, sulky-looking girl in her late teens. It was a portrait of that contrived and glamorous sort favoured by the acting profession, with the lips, nose, neck, and breasts sharply outlined by careful lighting. The accompanying letterpress was scant, conveying no more than that the police wished to know who she was.

  “There’s a sense in which one recognises her, of course,” said Fen thoughtfully. “You can see that photograph—or something pretty well indistinguishable from it—outside almost every repertory theatre in the country… What was she—brunette, red-head, mousy? They all come out the same in black-and-white photographs.”

  “Auburn, when I saw her. Saturated auburn, with a dressing of Thames mud and Thames weed.”

  Fen glanced at him sympathetically. “Well?” he said. “What about it?”

  “It happened early yesterday morning—that’s to say, during the night before last, at about 2 a.m. A taxi picked this girl up at the Piccadilly end of Half Moon Street, where she was talking to some man whom the driver didn’t particularly notice. She asked to be taken to an address in Stamford Street, on the other side of the river. Then, when they were in the middle of Waterloo Bridge, she told the driver to stop. She was a good deal overwrought, it seems, and the driver didn’t immediately start off again when she’d paid him. He watched her run towards the parapet, and as soon as he realised what she was going to do, he ran after her. The bridge was almost deserted, but there was a police-car coming across it, and the people in that saw what happened. The taxi-driver made a grab at her as she went over, but it was too late. She came up once, and screamed—she’d fallen flat on the surface of the water, and you know what that does to you when you fall from a height. One of the men in the police-car dived in after her, but she was dead when he got her ashore.”

  The cleaners had disappeared inside the studios. A shooting-brake, crammed with carpenters in overalls, emerged noisily from a hidden entrance to the left. But Fen hardly noticed it: in imagination he stood on the vacant, lamplit expanses of Waterloo Bridge, peering over the parapet at a figure which floundered through the shallows and the mud, dragging after him the limp, rent body of an auburn-haired girl… The cloud, driven hapless towards the north-west, had unveiled the sun again; yet for all that Fen shivered slightly, feeling on his mouth the night wind and in his nostrils the smell of the river at low tide. Such visions were not, of course, germane to the matter in hand: they would certainly be distorted, certainly incomplete. But it was with a curious reluctance that he put them aside…

  “Yes,” he said. “Go on.”

  Humbleby shifted uneasily—conscious, perhaps, that it is when a man is most sincere that he is apt to sound most histrionic.

  “The whole business,” he said, “was dealt with, of course, by the Divisional Superintendent. And he happens to be my brother-in-law—years ago, when he was only a sergeant, we were on a case together, and he met my sister at my flat and fell for her, God help him… Anyway, I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and being on holiday, I dropped in at the station yesterday morning, and he told me all about it. As you’ll have guessed, it was identifying the girl that was the difficulty. She’d dropped her handbag on the bridge, but there wasn’t anything at all revealing in it except for the photograph, and that didn’t have the photographer’s name on it. And her clothes were all new and not marked, so they didn’t help either.”

  “But the address,” said Fen, a little surprised at Humbleby’s ignoring what seemed the first and most obvious line of approach to the problem. “The address she gave to the taxi-driver.”

  “Useless. We found it all right, but it didn’t help us to identify her. She’d only moved in there the previous afternoon, and hadn’t so far either signed the register or handed over her ration-book. She’d told the landlady her name, of course, but the landlady was deaf and didn’t catch it… It really looked as if the Fates were in a conspiracy to make trouble for us.”

  “But her belongings—papers and so forth…”

  “Ah, yes. This is where the one really odd feature of the affair comes in.” And Humbleby paused, not displeased at having something mildly bizarre to relate. “By the time we got to it, her room and her things had been searched.”

  A ragged flight of blackbirds passed overhead, peering inquisitively down at the studio roofs. In a window in the wall directly facing them, a smooth-looking young man appeared, gazed at them suspiciously, muttered something to a companion invisible behind him, and vanished again. Humbleby, distrait, was playing with the door-handle. He was not normally a fidgety man, and Fen interpreted this as a sign of considerable perturbation.

  “Searched?” he said. “Searched for what?”

  “For signs of identifi
cation. Everything of that sort—papers, photographs, the fly-leaves of one or two books—had been removed and taken away. The laundry-marks had been cut out of all the clothes and the paper lining of the lid of a suitcase, which had obviously had a name and address on it, had been torn out. And whoever did it was thorough. We weren’t able to find a single thing he’d missed.”

  “But that’s extraordinary,” said Fen rather blankly. “If she’d been murdered, now… But I suppose there’s no doubt—”

  “None whatever. She killed herself all right. But mind you, there might quite well be someone who didn’t want her motive for killing herself to become known, and chose this rather oblique way of—um—occluding it… For instance, it’s possible she was pregnant. We shall know about that when the autopsy report comes in.”

  Fen nodded. “Odd,” he commented. “And interesting in so far as whoever was responsible must surely have realised that there was a very fair chance, in spite of all his efforts, of her being identified in the end. Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “You say you’ve now discovered that her name was Gloria Scott?”

  “That’s what this Miss Flecker said over the phone.”

  “Yes. Well, I don’t want to put wrong ideas into your head, but it sounds to me as if it might conceivably be a stage name.”

  Humbleby considered this. “‘Gloria’,” he murmured. “Yes, I see what you mean. And in that case, it would probably be her real identity that the murderer was trying to conceal.”

  “Quite so… But all this is hypothetical at present. Let me get one or two other things clear. For instance, is there any indication as to when this girl’s room was searched?”

  Humbleby had stopped fidgeting with the door-handle and was now manipulating the gear lever. “Yes,” he said, “there’s a pretty clear indication, as a matter of fact. It was almost certainly done during yesterday morning.”

  “After she killed herself?”

  “After she killed herself, yes. I needn’t go into all the details, but from the time when she arrived—Thursday, the day before yesterday, in the afternoon—until about nine o’clock yesterday morning, there really wasn’t a chance for anyone to get in and out unobserved and at the same time remain there long enough to do what was done; anyone, that is, except the landlady, whom there’s no possible reason to suspect. For one reason and another, the Super and I weren’t able to get down to making a search ourselves till yesterday afternoon, and by that time the mischief was done.” And Humbleby paused expectantly. “Well,” he said presently, “what do you make of it?”

  “Very little.” Fen sniffed deprecatorily and moved his long legs about in an attempt to mitigate the cramp which was stealing over them. “Very little indeed. This business of obliterating identity may not be connected with the suicide—in which case it’s quite unfathomable at present. But if it is connected, there arises the question of how the person concerned knew the suicide had happened. Was it reported in yesterday’s morning papers?”

  “Only a brief paragraph. The picture wasn’t published, and no names were given—since at that stage there weren’t any names to give.”

  “Our X might, I suppose, have actually been present when this girl threw herself into the river. Or anyway when they were pulling her out. Were there many lookers-on, do you know?”

  “A few… Yes, that’s a possibility.” Humbleby had engaged the lever in first gear and was struggling to disengage it again. “Undeniably,” he said, breathing heavily, “it’s obscure.”

  “Do leave the car alone, Humbleby; you’ll break something in a minute… Yes, well, the only thing is to find out a bit more about the girl. And that, I take it, is why you’re here.”

  Humbleby relinquished his efforts and gazed at the lever with distaste. He took a scrap of paper from his pocket, wrote on it the words “Be careful—you have left this car in gear”, and propped it up against the windscreen.

  “Yes,” he agreed, “that’s why I’m here. The call from this Flecker girl, who’d seen the picture in the papers, came through about half-past eight this morning, and I offered to drive here and interview her… To tell you the truth,” said Humbleby confidingly, “I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a film studio, and this is the first chance I’ve had.”

  In that confined space Fen’s cramp was growing intolerable. He brought the colloquy to an abrupt conclusion by opening the door and getting out.

  “Well, you’ll be disappointed,” he said unkindly. “And if I don’t go now, I shall be late. Can we arrange to meet at lunch-time?”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Humbleby, emerging hastily on the other side. “I’ll come in with you, and you can help me locate this person I’m here to see.”

  “I very much doubt if I can. But I’ll do my best.”

  They crossed the gravel to the nearest of the three entrances, mounted a short flight of steps and went inside. A circular vestibule received them. The monogram A.L.F. appeared in faded mosaic on its floor, and to the right of it, blocking the lower third of a Roman arch, was a species of reception desk with, however, no one behind it. The prospect beyond was of a corridor, bifurcating in the middle distance, with a number of doors marked PRIVATE on either side. Film studios go in terror of fire, and a great many buckets, coiled hoses and extinguishers were visible. But of other furnishing, and for that matter of human occupation, the place gave no sign. Abashed by its chilly quietude, Fen and Humbleby halted.

  “In my simple-minded way,” said Humbleby, “I had anticipated something like a cross between a lupanar and an automobile factory. No doubt we’re as yet only on the outer fringes. But still—”

  He broke off as footsteps, accompanied by a noisy, convulsive fit of coughing, burst upon them from a hitherto unnoticed passage to the left. This humanising influence materialised into a small, slim man of between thirty and forty, who strode into the vestibule with a handkerchief pressed to his mouth. He had a brown and humorously ugly face decorated with large and beautiful eyes, and Humbleby, who was a tolerably regular theatre-goer, recognised him at once.

  So also, apparently, did Fen; he said unsympathetically: “You’re ill.”

  “Like hell I am,” the new-comer croaked back. “You haven’t any whisky on you, by any chance?”

  “None.”

  “You’d imagine that even in a God-awful hole like this whisky would be procurable somewhere or other, but it isn’t. I’m going into the village to see if I can wangle some… By the way, this morning’s script conference has been postponed till eleven. And it’s not in thirteen, it’s in CC, wherever that may be. Oh, and Leiper isn’t going to be there—which means that I’m not, either, if I can get out of it.” The new-comer moved towards the door. “Of all the damned silly films ever contemplated…”

  “Just a moment,” said Fen. “Do you know where we can find a Miss Flecker?”

  The man paused. His face grew red and he sneezed twice before replying. “Flecker? Flecker? That’s a girl who works in the Music Department, isn’t it?”

  “Well, where is the Music Department?”

  “Oh, that’s easy.” He pointed. “You go along there and take the right fork, and then—oh no, blast it, I’m thinking of one of the sound stages. Well, let’s see now… I think if you take the left fork—”

  “You haven’t,” said Fen coldly, “the slightest notion where it is.”

  “Oh, yes, I assure you. Curse it, I’ve been there. The trouble really is that though this place seems to reduplicate itself as you go about it, you never get an exact repetition: there’s always a room or a corridor that’s different. I tell you what”—a novel and satisfying idea occurred to him at this point—“you ask someone; that’s your best plan.” He moved towards the door again. “Yes, that’s your best plan, I think. I may see you later.” He departed in a fresh fit of coughing.

  “Stuart North, wasn’t it?” asked Humbleby; and he spoke the name with a good deal of respect. �
��I didn’t know he’d taken to the films.”

  “He’s made only one so far,” said Fen. “Visa for Heaven, or some such trashy name. He’s due to play Pope in this fantasy I’ve been telling you about, and after that he’s going back to the stage.”

  “He’d be rather good as Pope, I should imagine. Given a little artificial deformity, he has the right physique. And facially he’s not unlike, either.”

  “I don’t think,” said Fen vaguely, “that Pope’s deformity is going to be stressed very much… Well, we’d better find the Music Department, I suppose. As my conference has been postponed, I can come with you. Let’s ask this girl.”

  “This girl”, now approaching with the glazed, intent expression of an amateur juggler about to embark on the most precarious part of his act, was a blonde stenographer, so superlatively groomed that she looked as if she would crack open at a touch. (“Lupanar,” said Humbleby with satisfaction. “We progress, then.”) She proved willing enough to lead them to the Music Department, and in her charge they traversed a warren of bare corridors and staircases, eventually fetching up at an unmarked door which she earnestly assured them was what they wanted. They thanked her and went in, finding themselves in a small room with two desks and a large filing-cabinet, where some half-dozen young people were giggling together and consuming tea. An amiable-looking youth detached himself from this group and asked Fen and Humbleby what he could do for them.

  “Miss Flecker,” said Humbleby. “We’re in search of a Miss Flecker.”

  “I’ll see if she’s busy.” The youth put down his cup and opened a door which led to an adjoining room. “Judy,” he said, “there’s two men want to see you.”

  A girl’s voice from within, pleasantly drawling and with a suspicion of a lisp, demanded to be told who they were.

  “Who are you?” the youth enquired agreeably from the doorway.

  “Detective-Inspector Humbleby,” said Humbleby, “of Scotland Yard.”

  “Cripes… I say, Judy, it’s—”