Very nearly the first thing Ethel did, on her first day chez Mr. Mervyn Fincham in his ground-floor garden flat, was to go through his desk. She had every opportunity to do so, since Mr. Mervyn Fincham, after letting her in, went off to take his constitutional stroll in Regent’s Park, only a step away.
So Ethel had all the time in the world to put his study to the sack. Well, “study.” It was really just an alcove in the large living room. His desk was a large old roll-top affair, with many drawers and a venerable Remington typewriter in the place of honour. There were lots of papers, cuttings and sheaves of pages clipped together. A quick shufti through this lot and a heap of correspondence told Ethel that Mr. Mervyn Fincham earned a precarious living writing short stories, occasional articles, and book reviews. She found copies of a couple of American mystery magazines, brightly coloured things with brutal men with guns on their covers. Flicking through them, she found stories under Mervyn Fincham’s name. She didn’t bother to read them. “Gentleman’s Relish,” one was called; “And Little Lambs Eat Ivy” was the other. Stuffed in the desk’s pigeonholes were letters and contracts from editors, and other assorted correspondence. Vera had been right about the typewriter and she was right about the telephone, too, Ethel discovered. How could someone live without a telephone? Then she tried the desk drawers and found them to be locked. That was not a problem. The late Bert, who in addition to his many other qualities was an accomplished thief, had, very early on in their marriage, initiated her into the Mysteries of the Lock. Because, as he told her, another skill is always useful in life, and besides, You Never Know.
She took two of the hair grips with which she was always well endowed, and following the delicate instruction she had received, tackled the top right-hand drawer, which opened to her with a grateful little sigh. There were folders inside.
Ha. First, a thick, packed brown folder, with a title in thick black felt pen. “Double Space,” it said. Underneath there were other folders, which seemed to be notes, untyped, written in Mr. Mervyn Fincham’s spiky handwriting, and appeared to be the outlines of other novels that he had in his head but were as yet unwritten. There must have been ten or twelve of these folders, each with ten pages of tightly written notes, swatches of dialogue, character descriptions. There was enough in these folders to keep Mr. Mervyn Fincham busy for years, Ethel thought. To keep anyone busy for years. Mr. Mervyn Fincham was a book writer on the quiet.
She looked at the clock and settled down to read Double Space. It was a crime novel whose principal characters were, curiously enough, two writers of crime fiction who clearly, even in the first chapter, didn’t get on. Things were obviously shaping up for a scrap.
She read contentedly for an hour and a half, and then had to stop and hoover and give the place a flick of a duster. When Mr. Mervyn Fincham came back, the place was clean and smelling slightly of Pledge. Ethel had noticed that if you sprayed a little furniture polish into the air around the front door, people didn’t bother checking too much.
Fincham said, “Very good, Mrs. Hoskins.” He was a tall, lanky man with a beaky nose and an untidy shock of black hair. He had a furtive look, Ethel noticed, a hunched-shouldered, guilty sort of stance, and a horrible way of talking out of the corner of his mouth, while avoiding her eyes. He looked like a man who was simply waiting to be found out. He looked like a man who had been found out and was talking to you in the prison exercise yard, where, Bert had told her, everyone talked like that. It wasn’t surprising that he had no friends, looking like that. Ethel couldn’t imagine anyone wanting Mervyn Fincham as a friend or even an acquaintance.
“I do my best to oblige, I’m sure, sir,” she said. Hermit or no hermit, eccentric or not, his money was as good as anyone else’s.
She left at twelve and walked down the road to the café, where she had a nice piece of liver and bacon, and thought about Double Space. There was a sizzle of excitement running through her body. He might be a long streak of piss, she thought, but he knew how to write. It had gripped her from the start and she wasn’t easy to grip. Agatha didn’t grip her like that. She had only finished about a third of what Mr. Mervyn Fincham had written and she was looking forward to reading the rest on Wednesday.
And then she’d see.
But in the meantime, she had Mr. Jolyon Carstairs to sort out. Who was a very different kettle of fish. Mr. Jolyon Carstairs lived in a vast apartment, on the second floor overlooking Regent’s Park. Mr. Jolyon Carstairs was not eking out an existence as a short-story writer like Mervyn Fincham. He had written books, lots of them. One whole shelf of his bookcase was filled with copies of his works. Ethel had sneaked one of them home and had read it. It was not much cop, she told herself. She couldn’t make head nor tail of it. People wandered around, nothing happened, other people wandered in and more nothing happened. But in the blurb, Mr. Jolyon Carstairs was hailed as “a master of the psychological mystery story.” Whatever that meant. If this was crime fiction, then Ethel was a monkey’s uncle.
In crime stories, people did things, terrible things, and were either caught or they weren’t. This empty stuff of Carstairs’s was not up to snuff. But Double Space, now there was a crime story for you.
To have a good crime novel, what you needed apparently was a good plot. The rest, well, that came along on its own. Mr. Mervyn Fincham appeared to have good plots coming out of his ears.
Well, he wasn’t the only one, she decided as she began Mr. Jolyon Carstairs’s housework the next afternoon. The trouble with Carstairs, she had decided long ago, was Carstairs. He was a pompous man who affected a small goatee and usually wore velvet jackets and bow ties. He had very little hair and eyes that looked as though they had been painted on. As Ethel watched him tittupping around the flat after her, his feet clicking on the parquet, she always had the urge to put out a foot and squash him.
It was a relief as always to leave his flat. Her last long-established duty was to prepare a large pot of Mr. Carstairs’s nightly infusion of hawthorn and verbena, which was apparently good for warding off all manner of ills, and which, according to him, Mr. Carstairs liked to sip, lukewarm, in the evenings. Ethel had taken a little trial sip once and once was enough. It tasted like something you would spray on tomatoes. He was welcome to it. Perhaps it was to help him sleep. She had noticed, in his bathroom cabinet, lots and lots of different sleeping pills. Mr. Carstairs evidently had an overactive mind which wouldn’t leave him alone at night. Interesting.
The next day was Wednesday, so she went bright and early to Mervyn Fincham’s to spray furniture polish into the air and read the rest of Double Space. She had been right. It was good. Mervyn had almost finished it; she could see where he was going with the plot, or at least she thought she could, and she could think of a twist or two that she would put in if she were him.
“If I was ’im,” she said to herself as she vacuumed cursorily round the steddy, “I’d make the first bloke the second bloke’s brother. That’s funnier. And, into the bargain, I’d give the copper a stammer. That’s different and that’s funny, too. And ’e doesn’t know nothing about how to pick a lock, neither.”
Well now. All you need is a good plot. But for a good plot you have to set it up. If you want to get on Woman’s Hour, that is.
The next day, Thursday — and she was keeping count because Vera was due back now in ten days or thereabouts — was her day for Jolyon Carstairs.