The English School of Murder Read online

  He went into the kitchen and searched vainly for a plastic garbage bag. As he returned reluctantly to the typewriter, he reflected on why he seemed incapable of doing such a mundane job without creating chaos. For this, as for so much else, he blamed the Civil Service, which had coddled him for such a long time with filing clerks. He stifled a wave of nostalgia.

  He reread the advertisement to which he was currently trying to apply. It required him to live in Birmingham, to travel widely within the United Kingdom and to reorganise a warehousing system for a cosmetics company. Apart from carrying with it a company car which he did not want and private medical insurance of which he did not approve, it closely resembled the Civil Service job which he had so angrily refused.

  Systematically Amiss sorted through all the other advertisements he had selected. He threw away the eighty per cent that demanded qualifications or experience which he completely lacked. He had already been turned down for dozens of similar jobs in management, marketing, personnel and business consultancy. Good academic qualifications and a stated willingness to learn were no substitute for pieces of dubious paper from business schools.

  Critically he reread closely the other twenty per cent. He knew uneasily that although these seemed open to someone of his background and experience, he laboured under a serious disadvantage. In Civil Service terms his record was excellent: recruited into the élite fast stream, he had bypassed most of his contemporaries to secure one of the most coveted jobs—private secretary to the head of his department. But of course to most businessmen all that was meaningless: the only part likely to make sense was his valueless period of secondment to a wally department in a wally organisation and even that was extremely difficult to write up attractively.

  He reflected bitterly on the irony that most civil servants who went out on secondment were offered highly attractive bribes to stay. The talents they revealed on the job: their articulacy, industriousness, clear-mindedness and above all, a mastery of prose beyond the wildest dreams of most businessmen, made them prize captures. But it was not until the outside world saw them in action that these talents were recognised. It was dispiriting how outsiders clung resolutely to the image of all civil servants as dreary hidebound grey men in suits. He could hardly be surprised that so far he had been offered only two interviews, both for commission-based sales jobs he knew he would be incapable of doing successfully.

  He and Milton had mulled over his joining the police and had concluded the idea was a non-starter. ‘You’d be better working with knaves than fools, Robert. You’d go crazy being ordered about by slow-witted bigots. And with all our efforts we’ve still got a fair number of those.’

  ‘What makes Ellis able to cope?’ Amiss had asked, for Milton’s protégé, Detective Constable Pooley, graduate and exmember of the Home Office, continued to flourish. ‘He’s like me. Ultimately he’s got a vocation that enables him to put up with almost any amount of shit. And besides that he’s buttressed by an insatiable passion for crime-solving.’

  Amiss felt the old familiar longing for a vocation and an even sharper one for a cigarette. He looked at his watch and realised it was in any case time to go out to his lunchtime job. As he reached for his raincoat he heard the telephone. It was Pooley proposing dinner. ‘On me, Robert.’

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ said Amiss rather stiffly, feeling slightly indignant that his misfortunes were being bandied about the Met. ‘I’m a barman now and making enough to finance the occasional feast at a greasy spoon.’

  ‘No, please, I insist. In fact I’d like it to be at my place. I’ve got an idea I want to talk over with you.’

  ‘Ellis, you wouldn’t be trying to get me involved in any boy-wonder detective stuff by any chance? I’m off corpses for Lent.’

  ‘Lent’s long over. What about tonight?’

  ‘Well, it is my night off.’

  ‘Done. Come at eight.’ And Pooley rang off.

  Amiss stood thinking for a moment. Then, repressing his misgivings, he shrugged, picked up his raincoat and set off for the Fox and Goose.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Good God, Ellis. This isn’t an interest. It’s an obsession.’

  ‘You disappoint me, Robert. What next? Are you going to ask me if I’ve read them all?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Amiss, surveying in awe the huge book-lined Victorian drawing-room that made up three-quarters of Pooley’s flat. ‘How many books, roughly?’

  ‘Ten thousand, at a guess.’

  ‘And the proportion that are crime-related?’

  ‘Maybe seventy per cent.’

  ‘Give me the guided tour.’

  ‘When I’ve got you a drink,’ said Pooley, and led Amiss into the kitchen.

  ‘It all started with Sherlock Holmes when I was eight,’ he said, mixing their gin and tonics. ‘I became an awful bore trying to make deductions based on people’s appearance. Even now I practise on the tube, though I doubt if even Holmes would have found it that easy in a multi-racial society—stretches one’s knowledge pretty thin. It’s more than I can do to tell the Dutch from the Germans or the Indians from the Pakistanis. Anyway, then I progressed through Edgar Allan Poe to general detective fiction.’

  He led Amiss over to the far right-hand corner of the room.

  ‘That’s what makes up these two walls.’

  ‘They all look pretty elderly,’ remarked Amiss, as his eye was caught within seconds by Margery Allingham, Freeman Wills Crofts, Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy Sayers.

  ‘No. They go chronologically, not alphabetically. So at the end you’ll see a few that came out only last month.’

  Amiss walked over and scrutinised his host’s latest acquisitions. ‘Playing it safe, aren’t you, Ellis? Ruth Rendell? Reginald Hill?’

  ‘I have to be highly selective now,’ said Pooley sadly. ‘I confine myself to the authors I’m sure will still be read in thirty years time. Otherwise I’d have to live in a warehouse.’

  He waved across the room. ‘The other shelves have great trials, lives of the great advocates, encyclopaedias of crime, dictionaries of poisons, general forensic stuff, popular psychology and so on. And to prove I’m not a monomaniac, there’s also a fair bit of history, literature and country stuff.’

  ‘Country stuff?’

  ‘Yes. Topography, reminiscences of country life, picture books. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I didn’t have you down as a rural type.’

  ‘Well I shed my Devonian accent at school.’

  ‘Where were you at school?’ asked Amiss idly. He looked towards the sofa and scanned the tables at either end.

  ‘You’re looking to see if I have ashtrays, aren’t you? Hang on, here’s a saucer you can use.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind? Most people do.’

  ‘Well, I’m not most people,’ said Pooley, with a slight hint of sanctimoniousness. ‘Anyway, what’s the use of inviting you here and having you a nicotineless nervous wreck all evening.’ He waved Amiss to the sofa and sat down in the rocking chair himself.

  Amiss lit his cigarette. ‘I was asking where you were at school.’

  ‘If I tell you, you must promise to keep it a secret—even from the Superintendent.’

  Amiss looked narrowly at his host. ‘Not Eton or Harrow?’

  ‘’Fraid so. Eton actually. But I’d never live it down in the canteen, so for Christ’s sake…’

  Amiss began to laugh. ‘Oh, Ellis, don’t tell me you’re seriously upper class. It’s not going to be Lord Pooley of the Yard, is it? I know the old jokes are the best, but really…’

  Pooley looked hurt. ‘I’m not even an honourable. And thank God I’ve got two older brothers between me and a title. Fortunately my old man is a peer of the utmost obscurity—a decent old stick but the original backwoodsman. He hasn’t attended the House of Lords for more than ten years so no one’s ever heard of him.’

  ‘And what does he make of your chosen career?’

  ‘He’s coming to ter
ms, like the rest of the family. They were always at me to be a barrister, which I’d have been hopeless at. There were mixed feelings about my going into the Civil Service. Mother was relieved it was respectable; Father talked about bloody pen pushers.’

  ‘What made you decide to leave?’

  ‘No good at it. I didn’t give a toss about policy and I hated drafting all those boring briefing papers. Besides, I was too imaginative and not clever enough. What I enjoy doing is sticking my nose into other people’s business and finding out why they’re doing what they’re doing. So now I can do that more or less legitimately.’

  ‘But how can you survive in the middle of all those thickos? Not to speak of all the yessiring and nosiring and sorryfornot-goingbytherulebooksiring?’

  ‘I went to public school. Remember? I don’t suffer from the egalitarianism and intellectual snobbery of you grammar school lot. And besides it takes the upper classes to understand that pecking order is not related to talent.’

  ‘How did you know I went to grammar school? Oh, sorry. You noticed the slight stoop that came from carrying a heavy satchel.’

  ‘Actually your C. V. is on file at the Yard. Now come into the kitchen, help me make dinner and bring me up to date.’

  ‘You know what I think?’ asked Pooley half an hour later over the pâté. ‘I think you’ve made a really dumb decision. Whether you know it or not, you’re a natural civil servant. You should go back. You know perfectly well they’d welcome you with open arms.’

  ‘I’m sick of people telling me that.’

  ‘Sorry, Robert. I know I don’t really know you well enough to presume like this, but I’m going to anyway. What the devil are you doing working as a postman and barman?’

  ‘Trying to raise enough to live and to visit Rachel occasionally. She hasn’t been able to get away from Paris for weeks.’

  ‘Now you’re being obtuse. You know what I mean. By your own admission you haven’t come across any real jobs you want. Why in God’s name don’t you go back where they’ll appreciate your intelligence and integrity?’ Pooley cleared their plates and served up the pasta. He left it to Amiss to break the silence.

  ‘I have a reason now.’

  Pooley looked at him encouragingly.

  ‘I didn’t really at first. It was simple obstinacy. I’ve been close to giving in. There’ve been a few overtures from old bosses in the Department.’

  He paused to attempt to stuff his fork-and-spoonful of spaghetti into his mouth. Half fell back on his plate, splattering his sweater with bolognaise sauce.

  ‘Damn. That’s a Jim Milton trick.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve noticed the Super is a bit clumsy,’ remarked Pooley as he mopped Amiss down.

  ‘Don’t you even think of him by his first name?’

  ‘Can’t afford to. He’s my lifeline. Without him I’d never have had a break. I’ve no intention of jeopardising anything by any undue familiarity. The canteen culture’s red hot on favouritism. So the more the Super talks to me informally, the more I treat him like a Field Marshal. Anyway back to you.’

  ‘I’ve had a lot of time to think over the past few weeks, especially on my early morning postal round. And a lot of my thinking was about the Service. Then last week I read Peter Hennessy’s book on Whitehall.’

  He took another forkful of salad and appeared to fall into a reverie.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, Ellis. I spend so much time alone at the moment that I forgot I wasn’t talking to myself.

  ‘There was a lot in there about the kind of person who becomes a civil servant, essentially the safety first type who wants security. And the point was made that even those who come in thinking they don’t fit into a stereotype almost inevitably do by the time they reach the top. He quoted an observer’s description of the process as “the velvet drainpipe”. You stuff your young élite up it and out they come at the top uninfected by any outside influences.’

  ‘So?’ asked Pooley encouragingly.

  ‘So I don’t want that to happen to me and I’m the kind of malleable person to whom it might. I’ve been horrified at how badly I coped with the real world in the first few weeks of unemployment, culminating in that scene I made in the Social Security office. My God! There I was surrounded by poor bastards at the bottom of the heap who have to put up with whatever’s dished out to them, and I throw a tantrum because I feel patronised.’

  ‘Do you mean you’ll never go back?’

  ‘No. In fact I’m beginning to think I’ll ask to have this year counted as leave of absence and review things at the end of it.’

  ‘And you’ll do what with it?’

  ‘The most attractive thing would be to stay in Paris with Rachel during her last few months there. But I won’t. I’ll probably spend my time in a variety of jobs learning how the other three-quarters live.’

  ‘You don’t feel you did that last year on secondment to BCC?’

  ‘No. That had little to do with real life, and anyway I was in a negative frame of mind throughout.’

  Pooley looked at him eagerly.

  ‘So you’re about ready to move on to something new?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘I’ve got just the job for you,’ said Pooley.

  Chapter 4

  ‘Let me give you the background first.’

  Pooley picked up the coffee tray and led the way back to the living-room.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Help yourself to milk and sugar. Brandy?’

  ‘You’re trying to soften me up, Ellis. Yes, please. I prefer this approach to the rubber truncheon. And besides tomorrow’s Sunday. God bless whoever abolished the Sunday post.’

  Pooley poured brandy into two glasses and thoughtfully put the bottle beside his guest. Amiss grinned at him, made an expan-sive gesture with his cigarette and said, ‘Carry on. And make it interesting. I want a story of love and hate, greed and retribution, death by moonlight and the downfall of a beautiful woman.’

  ‘I’ll lend you a Dornford Yates to take home with you. My story begins with an accident in a language laboratory in a Knights-bridge English school.’

  ‘I might have known. At least it wasn’t in the lavatory.’

  ‘Robert, do you think you could keep the interruptions to a minimum. Otherwise we’ll be here all night.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. Fire ahead.’

  ‘About two months ago, there was a 999 call from the Knights-bridge School of English. One of the teachers, Walter Armstrong—known as Wally and please don’t make the obvious joke—had been electrocuted. He was dead on arrival in hospital.

  ‘Central Area CID were called in and concluded it was probably an accident. It looked as though Armstrong—in the process of trying to fix a fault in the equipment—had reversed a couple of leads. He was alone in the school at the time of the accident, and so never had a chance.’

  ‘Why was he alone?’

  ‘It was eight in the morning and no one had arrived.’

  ‘Did he fancy himself as an electrician?’

  ‘Slightly. Although the principal couldn’t understand why he was bothering. He thought he’d told him a proper electrician was coming at nine.’

  ‘Odd.’

  ‘Yes. But then one of his colleagues said it wasn’t out of character for him to try to fix it first; apparently he enjoyed showing off his technical knowledge.

  ‘In any case, there seemed no motive. He was an amicably divorced man with grown-up children, and he seemed to do no more harm than occasionally get on his colleagues’ nerves. He was a bit of a fusser.’

  ‘Inquest?’

  ‘Accident.’

  ‘So where do you come in?’

  ‘I used to work in Central Area CID before being transferred to the Major Investigation Reserve at the Yard. And I had a drink last week with a DC from there who was unhappy about the verdict.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because he thought no one i
n his right mind would be tampering with the thing between the mains and the step-down transformer. And if the principal was right, it was extraordinary of Armstrong to come in early just to outsmart the electrician.’

  ‘Didn’t those points come up at the inquest?’

  ‘No. Because my friend’s superiors thought he was making something out of nothing. And he’s too junior to press a point like that successfully.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Not quite. Last week the principal was attacked on the way home and escaped serious injury or death only by chance. He was wheeling his bike in the dark up the alleyway behind his house when someone came up from behind and began to hit him unmercifully about the head. He had two strokes of luck. The first that he was wearing his Russian fur hat fastened under his chin and that dulled the blows. The second was that a neighbour with a bag of garbage happened to emerge from a back garden at the crucial moment, causing the attacker to run away.’

  ‘A small point. But what the devil was he doing wearing a fur hat in May?’

  ‘The wind really gets to you around Hyde Park Corner and Nurse is susceptible to ear infections.’

  ‘Nurse?’

  ‘Yes. Ned Nurse.’

  ‘Ned Nurse?’

  ‘Ned Nurse. Shall I go on or do you want to make a joke?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘There was no sign of the assailant and no apparent motive for the attack.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘And another thing. It’s sheer chance that my pal got to know about this incident. Nurse got away very lightly and the local coppers in North-West Area would’ve had no reason to pass the information on to Central CID. It was Nurse himself who mentioned it when he called in at Central to deal with a bit of paperwork.’

  ‘Suspicious,’ observed Amiss, who was losing interest rapidly.

  Pooley got up and began to lope up and down the long Persian rug in the middle of his room. From his supine position Amiss noted the pent-up energy in his long thin body. ‘Take up a postal round, Ellis, and you’ll begin to appreciate immobility.’ Pooley paid no attention. He was rapt in contemplation and periodically he ran his hands through his reddish-fair hair.