Corridors of Death Read online

  He thought Bradley was going to hit him when he asked where he had been at lunchtime the previous day.

  ‘My old woman is killed by some fucking lunatic up there and you have the nerve to ask me what I was doing. I suppose you think I killed that Clark as well. Maybe you think I thought they were having it off. I don’t have to put up with this fucking treatment. Get out of here.’

  It took all Milton’s much-vaunted tact to quieten him down and convince him that these were merely routine questions. Bradley eventually admitted to having spent lunchtime in the neighbouring pub with a couple of mates. He didn’t have a job at the moment. Had to rely on the wife’s pay packet. Wouldn’t even have that now, he added.

  And you couldn’t even bother to tidy up the house or do the shopping while she was at work, Milton wanted to say. The fellow was a monster. Oafish, brutal, greedy and lazy. Instead he took the names of the men Bradley had been with and began to ask him if Gladys had said anything about her meeting with Sir Nicholas on Monday morning.

  Bradley threw up his hands. ‘How can I be expected to remember everything she rabbited on about. Half the time none of it made sense.’

  ‘If you could just cast your mind back to Monday night, sir, I would be greatly obliged. We are reasonably sure that whoever killed your wife also killed Sir Nicholas, and she must have seen or heard something that made her a threat to the murderer.’

  Bradley sat and thought for a minute or two. In repose his face was different—almost pleasant. He might be quite amiable in the pub, thought Milton.

  ‘She said something about a row.’

  ‘With whom, sir?’

  ‘No. She didn’t have the row. She heard some fellow arguing with Clark about something. I don’t remember what it was about. I was watching television at the time and she was just going on.’

  ‘Can you remember anything at all, sir?’

  ‘She said something like that she was so embarrassed because she didn’t know whether to go into the room or not. She was supposed to see him and she could hear him from the corridor.’

  ‘Did she see who it was with Clark?’

  ‘Don’t remember.’

  Milton pressed on for a while, but he eventually realized that Bradley wasn’t going to come up with any more. If Gladys had mentioned any names, Bradley hadn’t listened. There was no point in going on. He promised to let Milton know if he remembered anything else, but made it clear that there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of his doing so.

  Milton got up to go. Bradley looked up and said unexpectedly. ‘She looked all right when I had to identify her last night. As if she didn’t know what happened. Do you think she knew what was going to be done to her?’

  ‘No, sir. I’m sure she didn’t.’

  ‘Nobody told me how it happened.’

  ‘We’re pretty clear that she walked into the room with the murderer of her own free will and that she was stabbed from behind as she was looking out of the window.’

  ‘You mean this geezer was someone she knew?’

  ‘Well, if not knew, would have trusted because he seemed all right.’

  ‘You’re telling me that she trusted someone she had heard arguing with Clark a few minutes before he was murdered?’

  ‘Perhaps she didn’t realize the implications, sir.’

  ‘The poor stupid bitch,’ said Bradley. ‘The poor stupid bitch. She didn’t know anything, did she? She went on about how nice it was to work with gentlemen. Nearest thing she ever got to one of her bloody silly love books.’ And to Milton’s consternation, he began to cry.

  It was many long minutes before he wiped his eyes and pulled himself together. Milton thought he must never have cried before—he was so incapable of controlling it. He kept repeating ‘poor stupid bitch’ through his tears and Milton realized it was an endearment. When he finally looked up he asked simply, ‘What am I going to do on my own?’

  Milton couldn’t cope. He could only hope that some of his mates would rise to the occasion and restore Bradley to his old aggressive self. He could offer nothing except platitudes which made him wince. He walked away from the mean little house with a feeling of release and wonder at the many forms in which love manifested itself. At least Amiss would be glad to know that there was somebody who would miss Gladys.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Lady Clark’s welcome was as different from Bradley’s as was her house. She greeted him in a reserved but courteous way on the threshold of her elegant Georgian house in a South Kensington square.

  Sir Nicholas certainly had taste. Milton gave him that. Classy was the word. A classy wife and a classy house. She was a bit insipid for his taste, the blonde hair and the eyes a bit too light, the features a bit too narrow and the manner a bit too apologetic. But she certainly had style.

  So had the interior of the house. Milton had seen it a hundred times in glossy magazines. Pale walls, good furniture, curtains and sofa coverings blended subtly and seemed to enhance each other. There were stretches of highly polished surfaces bearing innumerable pieces of expensive-looking silver and pottery. Not a reproduction in sight, thought Milton, looking round at the watercolours which dominated two of the walls. There had to be money here as well as taste. Surely you couldn’t produce that sort of effect on even a senior civil-servant’s salary. He knew they were always being accused of bleeding the country white, but they couldn’t be doing it to the level necessary to finance this. This house stank of money—it had to be inherited. Was it the wife’s? He didn’t think Sir Nicholas came from that sort of background. In a cursory glance at Who’s Who he had noticed that he had been educated at a state school—a fact which had surprised him at the time since he had a vague belief that all top civil servants were public-school chaps.

  Lady Clark put him sitting in one of the mustard sofas and offered him coffee. Milton accepted gratefully. He was still feeling some emotional exhaustion from his interview with Bradley. She disappeared. He wondered if the establishment ran to servants, and decided not. With the shortage of domestics these days it would be hard to imagine one staying in a house which contained Sir Nicholas. A daily cleaning woman, maybe, who could be kept away from him.

  Lady Clark re-entered carrying a silver tray. The cups, Milton noted apprehensively, were small and looked valuable. His and Ann’s taste lay more towards objects that you didn’t mind dropping. He hated the feeling of strain one got from handling other people’s treasured possessions. He was inclined to be rather clumsy at the best of times, and the fear of breaking one of the cups or spilling coffee on the off-white wool carpet was going to take away any benefit he might have had from a quick injection of caffeine. His normal sense of proportion reasserted itself while she was plying him with biscuits. It was pretty silly to worry about spoiling someone’s carpet when you should be worrying instead about how to ask them about a love affair you weren’t supposed to know about.

  He asked her first if she had any idea of who might have wanted to kill her husband. She didn’t. Nicholas could, she admitted, sometimes be a bit difficult. She had a feeling that he didn’t get on with all his colleagues. But then, who did?

  Cul-de-sac number one, thought Milton. Then he had his flash of inspiration.

  ‘Did he often bring work home from the office?’

  ‘Oh, yes. All the time. He worked very hard.’

  ‘Can you tell me if he brought any work home last weekend?’

  ‘Yes, he did. He had to write a speech for his Secretary of State. I don’t really understand why. I thought he had lots of staff to do that kind of thing.’

  ‘Could he type, Lady Clark?’

  ‘Oh, no. But I used to type things for him sometimes. I was a secretary once. I typed out the speech for him on Sunday.’

  ‘I’m sorry to ask you this, but could I see any notes he left? I’m anxious to
get all possible details on what he was doing during the days immediately preceding his death.’

  Lady Clark was too well-trained to question this. She led him obediently to Sir Nicholas’s study. He looked round, hoping for some kind of insight into the man whose behaviour was still puzzling him. What were his most private and treasured possessions? What kind of books did he read? Was he as ascetic in private life as he seemed to be in public?

  First he had to go throught the motions of looking through the notes for the speech. He wasn’t surprised by what he found. The original—correct—speech was lying neatly on the desk beside an immaculately handwritten sheaf of papers. He looked quickly through the two versions and saw the differences in figures, the changes of emphasis and all the other alterations that Amiss had told him about.

  ‘I don’t see the typewriter.’

  ‘Oh, no. That’s in my room. Nicholas couldn’t bear the noise and in any case he liked to be entirely private in here. It’s one of those golfball machines, you know. The ones with the replaceable typefaces. We had to have one of those because Nicholas used Greek quite a lot. I’m afraid I was a bit stupid with the Greek. I always thought it would be easier for everyone if he used English all the time.’

  ‘Do you mind if I look around? You never know where you may find a clue,’ he said fatuously. Lady Clark was impressed. ‘I’ll leave you here for a while, Superintendent. Come and join me when you’ve finished.’

  He looked appraisingly around the room. It was so different from the drawing-room that he was taken aback. Perhaps that reflected her personality and this his. If so, he was a strange man indeed. There was a whole wall of paintings—mostly reproductions here—which Milton found profoundly disturbing. Munch he recognized. And a Grosz. He disliked both of them. But if their view of the world seemed a bit bleak, they were positively cheery beside some of the ones he didn’t recognize. He looked closely at a violently depicted mouth out of which seemed to be coming screams of agony. Francis Bacon. Agony and despair. Of course. That was the keynote of the collection. Was he simply a sadist? No. Amiss had said something about Sir Nicholas’s pastime being pulling wings off Assistant Secretaries, but that seemed to be more a matter of expressing disdain for his intellectual inferiors. Certainly there were no dismembered limbs in his picture collection—no Bosch, no Goya.

  He gave up on the pictures and turned to the bookcases. A long row of reference books. That was to be expected. So was what looked to be a fine collection of Greek and Latin authors. Shelves full of biographies—mainly political. A surprisingly large collection of works on philosophy and religion. He looked in vain for English literature. There didn’t seem to be a novel or a poem anywhere. Not rigorous enough intellectually, he supposed.

  He looked idly through a shelf of records and found them as perplexingly unfamiliar as many of the pictures. The collection seemed to be comprised (with the exception of a great deal of Bach) of modern composers, to whose music Milton never listened if he could possibly avoid it. But he could hardly be surprised that Sir Nicholas preferred dissonance to harmony.

  There was only the desk to be looked at now. The rest of the study was sparse. Angular sculptures were dotted about here and there. They bore a close resemblance to the one which had finally done for Sir Nicholas. Milton looked quickly through the drawers of the desk. He could find nothing personal—only various kinds of stationery. He took one final look around, shuddered again at the pictures and rejoined Lady Clark.

  ‘Did you find anything, Superintendent?’ she asked brightly.

  ‘I don’t think so, Lady Clark. I must say I prefer the pictures you’ve got here to those in Sir Nicholas’s room.’

  ‘Oh, we didn’t have the same taste at all in things like that. I suppose I’m not intelligent enought to understand the sort of thing Nicholas liked.’

  Milton was sitting silently.

  ‘Is there anything else I can help you with, Superin­tendent?’

  ‘Several things, Lady Clark. To begin with, did you notice anything different about Sir Nicholas’s mood during the weekend?’

  ‘Just that he was in very good spirits. He was really pleased with the speech he wrote. He said he expected it to be very successful. It seemed rather dull to me, but I don’t know anything about politics.’

  ‘Let me tell you about that speech,’ said Milton, and proceeded to give her the bare essentials of the story of the substitution.

  She looked frightened. ‘Surely it was a mistake. He wouldn’t have done something as cruel as that to such a nice man as Harvey.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it, ma’am.’

  ‘You’re not saying that Harvey …?’

  ‘No, I’m not. He was not the only one present at that meeting who had been badly treated by your husband.’

  He wondered if she would try being insulted—refusing to hear anything against the martyred husband. But she didn’t. ‘Archibald,’ she said. ‘I thought Nicholas was very hard to say to him what he did.’

  ‘Mr Stafford?’

  ‘Yes. You will know that he was going to lose his job. I heard Nicholas say to him on the phone that he should be man enough to know when he was past it.’

  ‘Was such cruelty unusual in Sir Nicholas?’

  ‘I don’t know if we’re using the right word, Superintendent. He had very high standards of behaviour, and he was hard on people who didn’t live up to them. That meant he sometimes seemed cruel. But I don’t think he realized what he was doing. It was disappointment really, I think.’

  Milton thought of the Assistant Commissioner’s warning and decided to disregard it.

  ‘And did you live up to his high standards, Lady Clark?’

  ‘I haven’t for a long time,’ she said, and to Milton’s horror, like Bradley, she burst into tears.

  Chapter Nineteen

  As the sobs subsided, Milton prayed she wouldn’t be clear-headed enough to realize that, as things stood, he had no right to ask her to tell him about her marriage. She couldn’t be suspected of having murdered Sir Nicholas, and she couldn’t know that he was looking for a motive for Jenkins.

  He needn’t have worried. She held forth the way that Harvey Nixon had. Sir Nicholas had obviously succeeded in making his victims so tense that the first taste of the relief of being able to talk about what they had endured made them eager to get it all out.

  ‘We met nearly thirty years ago in Oxford. My brother was an undergraduate acquaintance of Nicholas’s, and he introduced us at a party he gave one weekend in January.’

  ‘Were you an undergraduate too?’

  ‘Oh, no. I was never much good academically. I had just started work in London as a secretary. I was only seventeen. Nicholas was almost twenty-three. He’d done his time in the army and was now in his final year. He was very clever, very glamorous and very attractive.’

  Milton’s face must have betrayed his surprise at such a description of the desiccated face he had seen in death. She got up and pulled a photograph album from a cupboard.

  ‘Would you like to see a picture of us on our wedding-day?’

  Milton looked with astonishment at the two happy faces which smiled confidently at him. The pretty blond girl sparkled at the dark and powerful young man at her side. He wasn’t handsome, but the humorous set of his mouth and the laughter in his eyes gave him an almost raffish attraction. He handed the album back without speaking.

  ‘You wouldn’t have recognized him, would you, Superin­tendent? For many years I’ve had to rely on that photograph to remind me of what we used to be like.’

  ‘You looked as if you were both very much in love.’

  ‘Oh, we were. We couldn’t see enough of each other. I used to go up to Oxford nearly every weekend and we had one of those magical summer terms of sun and parties and punting. Nicholas was so clever he
didn’t need to work terribly hard. He got the best First of his year in Greats.’

  ‘When did you marry?’

  ‘A month after he graduated. It was a silly thing to do. We’d never done anything together except enjoy ourselves. We’d never had to face any problems. Yet Nicholas didn’t want to wait and I couldn’t think of anything except what joy it would be to be together all the time.’

  ‘Did he join the civil service immediately?’

  ‘No. Not until the following year. We had decided to give him a couple of years to try to find a seat.’

  ‘He wanted to go into politics?’ asked Milton, incredulously.

  ‘Oh, very much. Nicholas was very radical in those days. He wanted to reform the world. He was an active socialist all the time he was at Oxford. You see, his father’s business had failed during the thirties and Nicholas had known what poverty was like. He used to shock my father with some of his ideas. Daddy was pretty well off and he didn’t like Nicholas’s talk about the corruption of the capitalist system. They got on quite well, though. Nicholas was so charming he could get round anyone.’

  Milton wondered wildly if they were talking about the same Nicholas.

  ‘You’re looking as though you don’t believe me, Superintendent, and I don’t blame you. I often haven’t myself been able to believe the change in him.’

  ‘What went wrong?’