He asked: “Can I help you?”
“No,” I said. “No. I was just looking for something.”
“And have you found it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I have.” He came into the room and shut the door, leaned across it and said casually: “Did you like Rowland Maybrick?”
“No,” I said. “No, I didn’t like him. But not liking him isn’t a reason for killing him.”
He said easily: “No, it isn’t, is it? But there’s something I think you should know about him. He was responsible for the death of my elder brother.”
“You mean he murdered him?”
“Nothing as straightforward as that. He blackmailed him. Charles was a homosexual. Maybrick got to know and made him pay. Charles killed himself because he couldn’t face a life of deceit, of being in Maybrick’s power, of losing this place. He preferred the dignity of death.”
Looking back on it I have to remind myself how different public attitudes were in the forties. Now it would seem extraordinary that anyone would kill himself for such a motive. Then I knew with desolate certainty that what he said was true.
I asked: “Does my grandmother know about the homosexuality?”
“Oh yes. There isn’t much that her generation don’t know, or guess. Grandmama adored Charles.”
“I see. Thank you for telling me.” After a moment I said: “I suppose if you’d gone on your first mission knowing Rowland Maybrick was alive and well, you’d have felt there was unfinished business.”
He said: “How clever you are, Cousin. And how well you put things. That’s exactly what I should have felt, that I’d left unfinished business.” Then he added: “So what were you doing here?”
I took out my handkerchief and looked him in the face, the face so disconcertingly like my own.
I said: “I was just dusting the tops of the golf-clubs.”
I left the house two days later. We never spoke of it again. The investigation continued its fruitless course. I could have asked my cousin how he had done it, but I didn’t. For years I thought I should never really know.
My cousin died in France, not, thank God, under Gestapo interrogation, but shot in an ambush. I wondered whether his Army accomplice had survived the war or had died with him. My grandmother lived on alone in the house, not dying until she was ninety-one, when she left the property to a charity for indigent gentlewomen, either to maintain as a home or to sell. It was the last charity I would have expected her to choose. The charity sold.
My grandmother’s one bequest to me was the books in the library. Most of these I, too, sold, but I went down to the house to look them over and decide which volumes I wished to keep. Among them I found a photograph album wedged between two rather dull tomes of nineteenth-century sermons. I sat at the same desk where Rowland had been murdered and turned the pages, smiling at the sepia photographs of high-bosomed ladies with their clinched waists and immense flowered hats.
And then, suddenly, turning its stiff pages, I saw my grandmother as a young woman. She was wearing what seemed a ridiculous little cap like a jockey’s and holding a golf-club as confidently as if it were a parasol. Beside the photograph was her name in careful script and underneath was written: “Ladies County Golf Champion 1898.”
A Very Commonplace Murder
“We close at twelve on Saturday,” said the blonde in the estate office. “So if you keep the key after then, please drop it back through the letterbox. It’s the only key we have, and there may be other people wanting to view on Monday. Sign here, please, Sir.”
The “Sir” was grudging, an afterthought. Her tone was reproving. She didn’t really think he would buy the flat, this seedy old man with his air of spurious gentility, with his harsh voice. In her job you soon got a nose for the genuine inquirer. Ernest Gabriel. An odd name, half-common, half-fancy.
But he took the key politely enough and thanked her for her trouble. No trouble, she thought. God knew there were few enough people interested in that sordid little dump, not at the price they were asking. He could keep the key a week, for all she cared.
She was right. Gabriel hadn’t come to buy, only to view. It was the first time he had been back since it all happened sixteen years ago. He came neither as a pilgrim nor a penitent. He had returned under some compulsion which he hadn’t even bothered to analyse. He had been on his way to visit his only living relative, an elderly aunt who had recently been admitted to a geriatric ward. He hadn’t even realized the bus would pass the flat.
But suddenly they were lurching through Camden Town, and the road became familiar, like a photograph springing into focus; and with a frisson of surprise he recognised the double-fronted shop and the flat above. There was an estate agent’s notice in the window. Almost without thinking, he had got off at the next stop, gone back to verify the name, and walked the half-mile to the office. It had seemed as natural and inevitable as his daily bus journey to work.
Twenty minutes later he fitted the key into the lock of the front door and passed into the stuffy emptiness of the flat. The grimy walls still held the smell of cooking. There was a spatter of envelopes on the worn linoleum, dirtied and trampled by the feet of previous viewers. The lightbulb swung naked in the hall, and the door into the sitting-room stood open. To his right was the staircase, to his left the kitchen.
Gabriel paused for a moment, then went into the kitchen. From the windows, half-curtained with grubby gingham, he looked upward to the great black building facing the flat, eyeless except for the one small square of window high on the fifth floor. It was from this window, sixteen years ago, that he had watched Denis Speller and Eileen Morrisey play out their commonplace little tragedy to its end.
He had no right to be watching them, no right to be in the building at all after six o’clock. That had been the nub of his awful dilemma. It had happened by chance. Mr. Maurice Bootman had instructed him, as the firm’s filing clerk, to go through the papers in the late Mr. Bootman’s upstairs den in case there were any which should be in the files. They weren’t confidential or important papers—those had been dealt with by the family and the firm’s solicitors months before. They were just a miscellaneous, yellowing collection of out-of-date memoranda, old accounts, receipts and fading press clippings which had been bundled together into old Mr. Bootman’s desk. He had been a great hoarder of trivia.
But at the back of the left-hand bottom drawer Gabriel had found a key. It was by chance that he tried it in the lock of the corner cupboard. It fitted. And in the cupboard Gabriel found the late Mr. Bootman’s small but choice collection of pornography.
He knew that he had to read the books; not just to snatch surreptitious minutes with one ear listening for a footstep on the stairs or the whine of the approaching lift, and fearful always that his absence from his filing room would be noticed. No, he had to read them in privacy and in peace. So he devised his plan.
It wasn’t difficult. As a trusted member of the staff, he had one of the Yale keys to the side-door at which goods were delivered. It was locked on the inside at night by the porter before he went off duty. It wasn’t hard for Gabriel, always among the last to go home, to find the opportunity of shooting back the bolts before leaving with the porter by the main door. He dared risk it only once a week, and the day he chose was Friday.
He would hurry home, eat his solitary meal beside the gas fire in his bedsitting room, then make his way back to the building and let himself in by the side-door. All that was necessary was to make sure he was waiting for the office to open on Monday morning so that, among the first in, he could lock the side-door before the porter made his ritual visit to unlock it for the day’s deliveries.