“And the personal difficulties? I believe he was a homosexual. There was gossip about it at the time. Do you know whether your client knew?”
“I have no information. It seems unlikely that she should not have known since she committed herself so far as to become engaged. She may, of course, have been so sanguine or so unwise as to suppose that she could help to cure him. I should have advised her against the marriage had she consulted me, but as I have said she did not consult me.”
And shortly afterwards, thought Dalgliesh, a matter of months only, she had begun her training at the John Carpendar and was sleeping with Peter Courtney’s brother. Why? Loneliness? Boredom? A desperate need to forget? Payment for services rendered? What services? Simple sexual attraction, if physical need were ever simple, for a man who physically was a coarse edition of the fiance‘ she had lost? The need to reassure herself that she could attract heterosexual desire? Courtney-Briggs himself had suggested that it was she who had taken the initiative. It was certainly she who had brought the affair to an end. There had been no mistaking the surgeon’s bitter resentment of a woman who had had the temerity to reject him before he had chosen to reject her.
As he rose to go Dalgliesh said: “Peter Courtney’s brother is a consultant surgeon at the John Carpendar Hospital. But perhaps you knew?”
Henry Urquhart smiled his tight, unamused smile.
“Oh yes, I know. Stephen Courtney-Briggs is a client of mine. Unlike his brother, he has acquired a hyphen to his name and a more permanent success.” He added with apparent irrelevance:
“He was holidaying in a friend’s yacht in the Mediterranean when his brother died. He came home immediately. It was, of course, a great shock as well as being a considerable embarrassment.”
It must have been, thought Dalgliesh. But Peter dead was decidedly less embarrassing than Peter living. It would no doubt have suited Stephen Courtney-Briggs to have had a well-known actor in the family, a younger brother who, without competing in his own field, would have added his luster to the patina of success and given Courtney-Briggs an entree to the extravagantly egotistical world of the stage. But the asset had become a liability; the hero an object of derision or, at best, of pity. It was a failure his brother would find hard to forgive.
Five minutes later Dalgliesh shook hands with Urquhart and left. As he passed through the hall the girl at the switchboard, hearing his footsteps, glanced round, flushed, and paused in momentary confusion, plug in hand. She had been well trained but not quite well enough. Unwilling to embarrass her further, Dalgliesh smiled and passed swiftly out of the building. He had no doubt that, on Henry Urquhart’s instructions, she was ringing Stephen Courtney-Briggs.
IV
Saville Mansions was a block of late Victorian flats close to Marylebone Road, respectable, prosperous but neither ostentatious nor opulent Masterson had the expected trouble in finding a vacant lot to park his car and it was after seven thirty before he entered the building. The entrance hall was dominated by a grille-encased lift of ornate design and a reception desk presided over by a uniformed porter. Masterson, who had no intention of stating his business, nodded to him casually and ran up the stairs. Number 23 was on the second floor. He pressed the bell and prepared for a brief wait.
But the door opened immediately and he found himself almost embraced by an extraordinary apparition, painted like the caricature of a stage whore and wearing a short evening dress of flame-colored chiffon which would have looked incongruous on a woman half her age. The bodice was so low that he could glimpse the fold between the sagging breasts bunched high into the cups of her brassiere, and could see where the powder lay caked in the cracks of dry yellow skin. Her lashes were weighted with mascara; the brittle hair, dyed an improbable blonde, was dressed in lacquered swathes around the raddled face; her carmine-painted mouth hung open in incredulous dismay. Their surprise was mutual. They stared at each other as if unable to believe their eyes. The change in her face from relief to disappointment was almost comic.
Masterson recovered first and announced himself:
“You remember,” he said, “I telephoned early this morning and made an appointment?”
“I can’t see you now. I’m just going out. I thought you were my dancing partner. You said you’d come early in the evening.”
A shrill nagging voice made sharper by disappointment. She looked as if she might close the door in his face. Quickly he slid one foot across the threshold.
“I was unavoidably detained. I’m sorry.”
Unavoidably detained. Too right, he had been. That frantic but ultimately satisfying interlude in the back of the car had occupied more of the evening than he had anticipated. It had taken longer, too, to find a sufficiently secluded spot even on a dark winter’s evening. The Guildford Road had offered few promising turnings into open country with its prospect of grass verges and unfrequented lanes. Julia Pardoe had been fussy too. Every time he slowed the car at a likely spot he had been met with her quiet, “not here”. He had first seen her as she was about to step off the pavement on to the pedestrian crossing which led to the. entrance of Heatheringfield station. He had slowed the car for her but, instead of waving her on, had leaned over and opened the passenger door. She had paused for only a second before walking over to him, coat swinging above the knee-length boots, and had slipped into the seat beside him without a word or glance. He had said:
“Coming up to town?”
She had nodded and had smiled secretively, eyes fixed on the windscreen. It had been as simple as that. She had hardly spoken a dozen words throughout the drive. The tentative or more overt preliminaries which he felt the game demanded of him had met with no response. He might have been a chauffeur with whom she was driving in unwelcome proximity. In the end, pricked by anger and humiliation, he had begun to wonder whether he could have been mistaken. But there had been the reassurance of that concentrated stillness, the eyes which, for minutes at a time, had watched with blue intensity his hands stroking the wheel or busy with the gears. She had wanted it all right. She had wanted it as much as he. But you could hardly call it a quick lay. One thing, surprisingly, she had told him. She was on her way to meet Hilda Rolfe; they were going to a theatre together after an early dinner. Well, either they would have to go without dinner or miss the first act; she was apparently unconcerned either way.
Amused and only slightly curious he had asked:
“How are you going to explain your lateness to Sister Rolfe? Or won’t you bother now to turn up?”
She had shrugged.
“I shall tell her the truth. It might be good for her.” Seeing his sudden frown she had added with contempt:
“Oh, don’t worry! She won’t sneak to Mr. Dalgliesh. Hilda isn’t like that.”
Masterson hoped she was right This was something Dalgliesh wouldn’t forgive.
“What will she do?” he had asked.
“If I tell? Chuck in her job I imagine; leave the John Carpendar. She’s pretty fed up with the place. She only stays on because of me.”
Wrenching his mind from the memory of that high, merciless voice into the present, Masterson forced himself to smile at the very different woman now confronting him and said in a propitiatory tone:
“The traffic you know… I had to drive from Hampshire. But I shan’t keep you long.”
Holding out his warrant card with that slightly furtive air inseparable from the gesture he edged himself into the flat She didn’t try to stop him. But her eyes were blank, her mind obviously elsewhere. As she closed the door, the telephone rang. Without a murmur she left him standing in the hall and almost ran into a room to the left He could hear her voice rising in protest. It seemed to be expostulating, then pleading. Then there was a silence. He moved quietly up the hall and strained his ears to hear. He thought he detected the clicking of the dial. Then she was speaking again. He couldn’t hear the words. This time the conversation was over in seconds. Then came another click of the dial. Another wail. In all she rang four numbers before she reappeared in the hall.