Elizabeth Ferrars and The Murder Room

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The Murder Room

Where Criminal Minds Meet

themurderroom.com

Murder in Time

Elizabeth Ferrars

Contents

Cover

The Murder Room Introduction

Title page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Outro

By Elizabeth Ferrars

About the author

Copyright page

Chapter One

IN THE drawing-room of a big stone house in a suburb of Bradford, an old woman was walking up and down, whistling to herself. She interrupted her whistling only to puff at the cigarette that she held between thin, nicotine-stained fingers, heavily loaded with old-fashioned rings.

When the cigarette was finished, she lighted another from the stub, which she then dropped, still glowing, into a glass ash-tray the size of a soup-plate.

She was a very old woman, but she was slender and upright and her steps back and forth across the Persian carpet that covered the whole floor of the enormous room had a jerky vigour. As she threaded her way without hesitation along what was obviously a familiar route, curving between brocade-covered chairs and little polished tables, loaded with photographs in silver frames and bowls full of beautiful roses, her whistling came tunefully from her pursed, shrivelled lips. They were tinted a pale shade of pink and there was a faint flush to match on her cheeks. She wore a dress of dull mauve satin and over it a knitted cardigan of the same shade. Her skirt reached halfway down her calves, showing slim ankles in good nylon stockings. She had diamonds in her ears.

While she walked and whistled and smoked, the room was growing darker. When presently a man came into the room through french windows opening on to the garden, he said at once, “Can’t we have the lights, darling, or will that disturb your mental processes?”

The old woman stood still, looking towards his shadowy figure.

“No, no, my dear, turn them on,” she said.

He pressed the switches and lights sprang on inside a great festoon of crystal.

“Got a cigarette left for me?” he asked.

She took a crumpled packet from the pocket of her cardigan and held it out.

“You really shouldn’t,” she said. “It’s bad for you.”

He corroborated what she said by coughing as soon as he drew in the smoke. He was a short, stout man of about fifty-five with a few wisps of dark hair smoothed across the crown of a bald head, a pale, round face and horn-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in an old blue blazer and flannel trousers and had a canary-coloured silk scarf knotted round his neck. His hands, in one of which he held a small trowel, were dirty from gardening.

“Well,” he said, “have you come to any decision?”

“Yes.” As she nodded her head decisively, the diamonds hanging from her ears trembled. “We’re going.”

“Oh dear,” he said. “Must we? And with the garden just at its best too.”

He turned to look out wistfully at the rather sooty lawn and formal flower beds enclosed by a high wall of blackened stone.

“That man’s up to something,” she said, “and I’ve got to find out what it is. That’s why we’re going.”

“Mother darling, that isn’t your reason at all,” the stout little man said. “The fact is, you always liked him in spite of everything and you’re looking forward to a frivolous week-end at Nice.”

“My dear Hector, I can go to Nice whenever I like.”

“But this is at someone else’s expense, and that’s so nice, isn’t it?”

She cackled a little. “Have your joke, boy. Of course, I admit that this invitation does rather appeal to me. It’s so ridiculous, with a sort of pre-war ostentation about it that seems particularly attractive in times like these. I shall have to buy some clothes, I suppose—I’ve nothing in the least suitable for the Riviera. But still, the important thing is that the man’s up to something. Mark Auty——” She emphasised the name oddly and laughed again. “Mark Auty would never have invited us, and apparently all those other people too, without having some peculiar object behind it. And I think it might be rather important to discover what that object is.”

The man gazed across the room at her with a sad sort of owlishness.

“You’re fascinated by him, darling,” he said. “You always were.”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” she said and began walking up and down the room again. But a trace of a flush had mounted behind the delicate pink tinting of her cheeks and as she started whistling again, her first notes were a little off-key.

“Well, if we must go, we must,” the man said with a resignation which showed that he knew from long experience that argument was useless. But there was a deep frown on his face as he strolled back into the twilit garden.

That same evening, in a small hotel on the edge of Dartmoor, a pretty young woman who had been serving in the bar said good-night more hurriedly than usual to the last customer and closed the doors.

Until that moment her face had been animated and she had been laughing and talking with such gaiety to the men gathered in the bar that one or two had asked her if by any chance it was her birthday, or if anyone she knew had just died and left her some money. But as the bolts slipped home her face changed. The excitement left it and her expression became determined and rather defiant.

It was a little oval face, naturally pink and white but with a light summer tan on it. She had wide grey eyes and a small, upturned nose. Her hair had been bleached to an almost silver fairness and fell sleekly to her shoulders. She was a slender creature, dressed in a flowered cotton dress cut very low between her breasts. She wore several strands of pearls round her neck and a pair of big ear-rings of painted china.

Turning from the doors, she walked quickly across the empty bar-room to the small room beyond it. Her shoulders were held back tensely, expressing nervousness or anger, while her full lower lip was sucked in under her upper teeth with a look of fierce preparedness for battle. Throwing open the door of the inner room, she stood there and demanded, “Well now, do you see it my way?”

“Hell,” said the man who was sitting at the table with a number of papers spread out before him, “I tell you there’s a catch in it. There’s something the matter with it.”

“All right, then, there is—how should I know about that?” the girl said. “But when are you and me going to get another chance like this, will you tell me that?”

“You don’t know Auty like I do,” the man said. His voice was rather thick and heavy. “I know him too bloody well. He’s up to something. Asking you and me to a party in Nice! Chartering a plane for us! He’s never done anything much for us before, has he? He’s never invited us anywhere before.”

“He helped you buy this pub, didn’t he?”

“Conscience money.”

“What d’you mean?”

The man did not reply. He was a thin, dark man of about thirty-five, whose pallid, rectangular face had the kind of handsomeness that vaguely recalls a variety of film-stars. His black hair was cropped short, except for a wavy lock that fell over his forehead. He wore a loose tweed jacket, cut in the American style and a nylon shirt. He suffered badly from hay-fever, which made his fine dark eyes water and had reddened his nose.

The girl gazed at him for a moment, frowning, then changed her tactics. Going behind him, she slipped her arms round his neck and bent over him, rubbing her cheek against his hair.

“Timmy darling, you know what this means to me, don’t you? You know nothing like it’s ever happened to me before. And you do love me, don’t you? You do want to please me?”

“Of course I do,” he muttered. “But you don’t know Auty.”

“All right, I don’t. But even if he is up to something, what can that matter to us? Where could people like us fit into any scheme of his?”

“That’s just it—where?”

“I think it’s just like he said in his letter. He’s marrying this girl with pots of money and he wants her to know he thinks that he and his friends are just as good as she is.”

“That isn’t exactly what he said.”

“No, but it’s what he meant, isn’t it?”

“And him and me aren’t friends any more.”

“But you used to be, didn’t you? You were pals when you were in the army. You’ve always said you taught him everything you knew. Well, now he’s had this bit of luck, I daresay he’s got around to remembering that.”

The man gave an abrupt laugh, stood up and disengaged himself from her arms.

“We’re not going,” he said. “And I’ll tell you why we’re not going, then you can stop pestering me about it. Maybe Auty knows a few things about me that he thinks he’s going to use in some way, see? Maybe he thinks he’s going to put the screws on me to make me do something or other that suits his book. Well, I’m not falling for it. Talking about the army and old friends and all that! I know better than that. The only possible reason he could have for asking me to his blasted party is that he means to make use of me. I don’t know how and I don’t care how—because I’m not going.”

He went out of the room.

The girl made as if to follow him, then stood still, gazing after him thoughtfully, her lower lip flattening itself under her upper teeth in the way that made her small, pretty face look savage and determined.

At a later hour that same evening, in a Soho club, a red-haired woman in a short-skirted, strapless evening dress, with a fur stole bundled carelessly on the table before her, sat waiting restlessly for a man who had not arrived at the time that he had promised.

As her anger mounted because of this, her orders for drinks became more and more frequent, and when at last the man appeared, her quite handsome features had acquired a flushed, set look, dull and brooding.

The man only glanced in her direction, then went to talk to the barman.

“Why d’you let her do it?” he asked. “You know I don’t like her like that.”

The barman shrugged. “She keeps quiet that way.”

“I don’t like it, I’ve told you that before.”

“I’d get yourself another girl then.”

“And I don’t like that sort of talk from you either.”

“Suit yourself.” The barman turned away to attend to another club member.

The man who had just come in went over to the corner where the woman sat.

He was a slightly built, black-haired man of about forty. High cheekbones and a sharply-pointed chin made his face seem triangular. There were hollows under the cheekbones and his skin had a sallow and unhealthy look. He was dressed in a dark blue pin-stripe suit that had come from a good tailor and his shirt and his shoes had been made for him. But a lace handkerchief, demonstratively displayed in his breast-pocket, spoiled the general impression.

The woman stared up at him with dull, resentful eyes.

“So you got here at last,” she said.

“No,” he said, “quite a while ago, remember?” His voice was mellow and agreeable and his accent, in a way that was somehow inappropriate to the rest of him, was perfectly cultured. “Remember when I got here, Myra?”

“Oh, I remember. And Harry remembers too. . . . Pete, I don’t like that Harry. He’s getting above himself.”

“He’s all right, he knows his job,” the man said. “Come on now, let’s go.”

“Aren’t you going to have even one drink?”

“No.”

“Well, I want to phone my mother first.”

The man turned to the barman with a laugh. “Harry, she wants to phone her mother.”

“I know; they’re like that sometimes,” Harry said.

“It’s too late to phone your mother, she’ll be in bed,” the dark man said. “But I’ll drive you home. You’re no use to me in that state.”

Tears gathered in the woman’s dull eyes. “You aren’t kind to me, Pete.”

“If I were, you wouldn’t know the difference,” he said. “Come on.”

He picked up her fur and threw it round her shoulders. “What about next week?” she asked.

“No, next week’s off. I’m popping down to Nice for a few days. I’ll see you the week after. Then we’ll have another quiet evening together like this, won’t we?”

“I hope you fall in the sea and drown,” the woman said. But she let him take her arm, and, stumbling a little, went with him docilely to his waiting car.

In an old house in an Oxfordshire village, a man and a woman sat drinking a last cup of tea together before going to bed. The tea had been poured from a fat-bellied, Georgian silver teapot and the man and the woman were drinking it from blue and gold Queen Charlotte cups.

They had had guests that evening, the vicar and his wife from the village, a professor of Ancient History from Oxford, and a young woman who was just about to marry a peer. It had been a quietly successful evening and should have left the host and hostess gratified and at peace with the world. Yet as they sat drinking their tea in the small, beautiful, white-panelled drawing-room, the faces of both were distraught, and the eyes of the woman were filled with positive terror.

“But I can’t understand it!” she said into the silence that had fallen between them. “I can’t imagine what he wants. It’s —it’s absolutely indecent. It’s incredible.”

She was a tall woman of about forty-three, wide-shouldered and fairly heavily built, with a dignified deliberateness in her gestures. Her brown hair was tinged with grey, parted in the middle and worn in a small bun. Her face was long, with a high-bridged nose and a firm, pleasant mouth and would have had a certain beauty if the skin had not sagged so that she looked a good deal older than she was. She was wearing a shapeless dress of flowered crepe that she had been wearing for evening parties for two years.

“All the same, I think we ought to go,” the man said in a low voice.

He was about five years older than the woman, not quite as tall as she was, with close-cut, fair hair, a ruddy, clear skin, and the look that never quite leaves a naval man, even years after he has retired from the sea. He wore a double-breasted grey suit, old but still presentable. He was watching the woman thoughtfully, while her frightened eyes roamed about the room, taking in nothing.

“After all,” he went on after a pause, “he must want a solution as badly as we do. It’s possible that he’s had some idea that will help us all out of this difficult situation.”

“How can there be any way out?” she asked in a strangled voice. “For us, perhaps yes, if we can face it. But for him, no. None. And that’s what I’m afraid of. What does such a man do when the situation’s hopeless?”

“I don’t know. But the whole idea of this party in Nice is so bizarre that it may mean he has some idea and I think at least we ought to go and talk the position over with him.”

She shivered. “That sounds reasonable, yet everything in me feels that it’s the wrong thing to do. Oh, if only I’d never opened that paper!”

“You’d have opened another one sooner or later.” He put down his tea-cup and went over to her, sitting down on the arm of her chair, laying a strong hand on one of her shoulders. “Vi dear, can’t you realise that this thing isn’t really important for us. It’s been a shock, I admit, and I’d give all I possess to have prevented its happening. But still, we can face it. For all we know, we’ll have to face far worse things in our lives —disease, death, the real things.”

She gave a deep sigh. “It’s easier for you, Denis. You’re so much surer of yourself than I am. You know what’s important and what isn’t. But I’ve done so much pretending all my life that when something strange happens, that I’m not prepared for, I seem to have nothing to hold on to or to guide me.”

“You’ve got me, anyway,” he said, “and you can hold on all you like, even if as a guide I’m not all that remarkable.”

She smiled up at him. “But that’s part of the trouble. You’re all I’ve got in the world and all I’ve ever had. Don’t you see how frightened that makes me? You and this house and this life here that I’ve gradually got to understand— though those things are just part of you and wouldn’t be anything without you. But if I were to lose it all——”

“You won’t lose it, any of it.” He bent and kissed her on the forehead. “Will you leave it to me, Vi? Will you trust me to look after you? As a matter of fact . . .”

He got up and went to the window. The scent of stocks was strong on the night air, their white clusters showing up in the darkness. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked and another answered it, but the evening was very quiet.

Standing with his back to the room, he felt for a pipe in his pocket. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I think I know how to deal with the situation.”

In a hotel-bedroom in Bloomsbury, a young man, sitting by the open window that looked out over a street noisy with traffic, where the heat of the evening had become stale and exhausted, read and re-read a letter that had reached him that morning.

There was practically no expression on the young man’s face as he did so, but only an inward look, as if it were memory that occupied him, rather than the words that he was reading so carefully. Yet he was not merely looking through and beyond the letter in his hand, for now and then his lips actually formed the words on the paper.

Partly because his face was so set, it had a stern look. It was a sensitive face, intelligent and imaginative. Its most marked feature were the eyebrows, which were even darker than his dark hair, unusually level and almost meeting above the straight, narrow nose. His lips were full, his chin pointed. His grey eyes had the slight overbrightness of someone who spends too much time alone, staring emptily before him, dreaming too much.

At last he threw the letter down on the bed and stood up. He seemed tired and his movements were languid but without indecision. Opening the battered suitcase that was on a stand in a corner of the room, he rummaged about in it among crumpled shirts and unwashed socks until he found something that was carefully wrapped in a green knitted pullover.

Removing the wrapping, he looked interestedly but not excitedly at the object he held. It was a small revolver.

Still with the same calm, as if merely to reassure himself of something that he was aware he knew already, he examined the revolver to make sure that it was fully loaded, then he wrapped it up again in the green pullover, replaced it in the suitcase, closed the lid and locked the case.

Then he sat down at the table, took a sheet of hotel notepaper from its drawer and began a letter, “My dear Mark,” going on to accept an invitation to a week-end party in Nice.