“Right, I’ll take a stroll round there, see what I see. You carry on here, you know the form, S.O.C.O. and the pathologist.”
“Very good, sir.”
Hennessey walked the few hundred feet to St. Jude’s Terrace, to number 134, being the forwarding address as written on the envelope found in the hallway of Jennifer Tyrie’s home. He knocked on the door. It was opened quickly by a bespectacled man in his forties.
“Mr. Naylor?” Hennessey asked.
“No... he’s not in at the moment. You are?”
“Police.” Hennessey showed his ID. “And you are?”
“Curbishley. Andrew Curbishley. This is my home. Ralph has a room here, he moved in recently, just until he gets himself back on his feet. Things have not been too good for him of late.”
“No?”
“No. I dare say an astrologer would say that a heavy planet is passing through his aspect.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Why? Is he in trouble?”
“Let’s just say we’d like a chat with him. When did you last see him?”
“Last night, but I heard him leave the house very early, before dawn. Unusual for him; he usually spends the day in his bed. If he hasn’t anything to get up for, he won’t get up.”
“It would help your friend if you told me what you know about him.”
“You’d better come in.”
Hennessey followed Curbishley into his house. It was cosy, he thought, comfortably furnished with what appeared to be second-hand furniture from charity shops. The walls were lined with bookshelves, each one crammed with books.
“You’re not employed, Mr. Curbishley?” Hennessey remarked as he sat, invited, in a vintage armchair of interwar period, he thought, the sort that people would have sat in to listen to Mr. Churchill speak to the nation on the wireless.
“I gave it up to devote my life to writing science fiction. I actually manage to scratch a living. I dare say it’s fairly low-grade stuff, spaceships that run out of fuel, that sort of thing. My existence is that of a garret-dwelling, starving artist, but it’s better than working at a job which does your head in. There’s more things in life than money.”
“And Mr. Naylor?”
“He was a woodcarver.”
“Was?”
“He says his tools have gone cold. It’s an expression he uses for loss of creativity. He’s had a bad time of late, the bottom has dropped out of his life.”
“Oh?”
“Well, he was very well set up in a modest sort of way, a lovely little terraced house, very basic but that was all he needed, nice view of the river and he spent his days carving wood, producing some lovely work, selling it, getting known... Gave up teaching to do it, as I did. We’re both ex-teachers. Then he met a woman, pushy woman, only child, everything had to be her own way. She lives just in the next street, in fact, Jennifer Tyrie by name.”
Hennessey remained silent.
“They picked up with each other and instead of she moving in with him, she bullied him into selling his house and moving in with her in the house that she’s renting. Ralph being Ralph, he did just that, sold his house and moved in with Jennifer. Then he found out that the estate agent had stolen his property. He’d managed to make Ralph part with it for less than half its value. He saw it advertised a few weeks later in the window of the estate agent who’d sold it for him. It was fairly obvious what had happened, but he carried on living with Jenny, effectively becoming her patron, supporting her as she produced her very unsaleable paintings, buying a car at her insistence, clothes, foreign holidays. For an artist, she’s a very materialistic woman. Such was the expense that in just six months all the money Ralph had from the sale of his house had evaporated. Then she showed him the door. Found someone else, she said.”
“Oh...”
“I found him living in a bed-sit like a student. He’d lost everything... He was a man in his forties and in six months he’d lost his world. He was close to topping himself so I invited him to take a room here until he got himself sorted, but the main problem was not the loss of his house and his financial security, but the loss of his creativity as he took on board just how much the estate agent had fleeced him and how Jenny had spent all his money, then kicked him out as soon as he was penniless. That’s when he said his tools had gone cold. He said, ‘They’ve killed me,’ and he said he was going to kill them, and I thought, Good for you!”
“You thought that?”
“Yes. For the first time in his life he was showing a bit of fight. He’s learned a hard lesson, but at least he won’t get pushed around anymore, that’s how I saw it. Why...” Curbishley’s voice trailed. “Oh, he hasn’t...”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
“Try the Shoulder of Mutton, at the end of the street. If he’s not in his bed, he usually spends his time in there these days.”
“It’s not the money.” Ralph Naylor revealed himself to be bald, bespectacled, casually dressed, very much an artist-type in Hennessey’s view. “That I can live without. It’s there.” He held his hands up. “Maybe I was a bit naive but when I was naive at least I could produce. Between them they took the only thing I had. If you are a creative personality and you lose your creativity, you are nothing. I believe that that was why Ernest Hemingway committed suicide.”
“Really?” Hennessey stood over the man and found time to glance round the interior of the Shoulder of Mutton and thought that were it not for the electrical gadgets here and there, he might well have stepped back into Victorian times — high ceilings, oak panelling, wrought-iron tables with wooden surfaces.
“He went down with depression, they gave him ECT and succeeded in shocking the illness out of him, but they also blew the creativity out of him. By then, he was a wealthy man and could have spent the remainder of his life blasting elephants to pieces or pulling very big fish out of the Gulf of Mexico. But without his creativity all that was meaningless, so he topped himself. I can understand why he did it.”
“He didn’t murder the doctors, though. There is that difference in your action and his.”
“No... but the doctors acted in good faith; I’m a victim of malice.” He sat in front of an untouched pint of beer. “Don’t really feel like drinking.”
“I can see that. Where’s the murder weapon?”
“I left it in the backyard of Jenny’s house. The police will have found it by now.”
When Ralph Naylor had been charged and led wide-eyed to the remand cells, Hennessey left the paperwork to Yellich and drove home to his house in Easingwold. He supped and then walked his dog. Later he stood in the garden of his house and said hello to his wife, who he knew was there. She had designed the garden and her ashes were scattered there. She had been so young, all was ahead of her, but life had simply left her one day when she was walking in the street. All the medics could offer by way of explanation was “Sudden Death Syndrome.” As he stood there he felt a warmth wrap around him which was more than the warmth of the evening.
He packed an overnight bag and drove to Skelton, north of York, with its tenth-century church and prestigious houses. He walked up the gravel-covered drive of one such house, detached, half-timbered, as bats flew and darted in the air above him.
Inside the house, at the kitchen table, as the “ankle-biters” ran about upstairs, putting themselves to bed, he reached across the table and took the hand of the lady of the house. “I feel sorry for him, really,” he said.
“I think I know what you mean.” Louise D’Acre nodded. “Three victims, in a sense.”
The Foreigner’s Watch
by Patricia McFall
A writing instructor who ran the extension programs at Cal State Fullerton from 1999–2002, Patricia McFall has done some exceptional work in the crime genre. Her debut mystery, 1992’s Night Butterfly, was chosen one of the year’s ten best crime novels by the L.A. Times, and of her first mystery short story, published in the book Mystery Street, the Boston Herald said: “worth the price of the paperback.” Ms. McFall says her ambition now is to “write one worth the price of a hardcover.”