The Tango School Mystery Page 4

  "And these letters had only just been discovered?" I asked.

  "In unusual circumstances, too. It seems that Sir Oscar Maundsley, the fascist leader in the 'thirties, who'd been interned in 1940, had used them as part of his appeal for release. They persuaded the authorities that he was prepared to co-operate in naming people who posed a genuine threat. And they released Maundsley under tight conditions. He had to report to a police station every day."

  "If Maundsley had the Gervase letters, why did he wait two years before using them to spring himself from jail? Why not use them when he was first detained?"

  "That's the point," Henrietta said. "Maundsley had only been handed the letters a few weeks earlier. They were the letters Gervase had written to a fascist fellow traveller called Derek Clapham."

  It was one of those moments when my hair literally did stand on end. It was a weird experience. Like being entombed in a fur coat.

  Henrietta gave me a worried look. "You know Derek Clapham?" she asked.

  "Let's just say we met last night in unfortunate circumstances."

  I told Henrietta about Clapham's murder and its aftermath.

  My mind was racing like a Formula One car. When Figgis had briefed me the day before, he'd mentioned Gervase blamed Maundsley for his internment. He'd said Maundsley had used Gervase's own letters to shop him to the authorities. But he hadn't said the letters had been provided by Clapham. Perhaps he didn't know. But the news certainly put the hunt for Gervase in a new light.

  I said: "Why should Clapham give Maundsley letters which he must've known would land his old friend Gervase in trouble?"

  "From what I hear Clapham was one of those dreamers always thinking up new schemes but always short of the readies. He hoped for a hand-out from Maundsley. Do you think Gervase could have killed Clapham?"

  I shook my head. "I don't know. He would have known about Clapham's role in his downfall from the moment the police had detained him back in 1942. He's had years since the war to track down Clapham and do him harm if he wanted to. Why wait until now?"

  Besides, I thought to myself, according to Figgis, Pope had said he thought Gervase was planning to kill Maundsley, not Clapham.

  I said: "Do you still have the original cutting about the tribunal hearing?"

  Henrietta pulled a rueful smile. "No."

  "Where is it?"

  "Gone."

  "Gone where?"

  "I don't know. It vanished two days after Gerald Pope became editor of the paper."

  "And you think he took it?"

  "Who else?" Henrietta said. "I can't imagine there was anybody else who would suspect it might be there. Certainly nobody else on the paper who'd have access to the morgue and the opportunity to take it."

  "Presumably Pope took it because if anyone discovered it, he'd be embarrassed."

  "I reckon that must be the case."

  "Was His Holiness a secret supporter of the fascists in the nineteen-thirties?"

  "I don't know," Henrietta said. "Do political opinions run in families?"

  I didn't answer that. Instead I said: "I suppose if the cutting had been discovered, questions would have been asked. Even if Gerald Pope had been a war hero with a Victoria Cross, there's still the odium of guilt by association. Perhaps Pope would have been asked to resign. Still, he must be confident that won't happen as the cutting has been destroyed."

  "The original cutting has been," Henrietta said. "But the day Pope joined, I took a copy of it."

  "You thought he might be after it?"

  "It did occur to me. Let's just say I was being cautious."

  "Where is it now?"

  "Locked in my private drawer. Want to see it?"

  "Does the roué want to glimpse the showgirl's garter?"

  Henrietta produced a handbag from underneath her desk, reached inside it, and pulled out a bunch of keys. She unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk, pulled it open, and rummaged among a stack of files.

  She pulled out a slim buff folder, blew some dust off the top, and handed it to me.

  Inside was a single sheet of paper - the copied cutting. I read through it. It was a short report that had appeared in the Chronicle in October 1942. In no more than one hundred and fifty words it told me nothing that Henrietta hadn't already mentioned.

  I handed the cutting back to her. "You better keep this safe. There could come a time when it will be important."

  "To Gervase?" Henrietta asked.

  "No. To you and me."

  Chapter 6

  I stepped out of the morgue feeling a bit like one of those poor blokes being stretched on the rack in mediaeval times.

  I was being pulled in two opposite directions. Looking one way, my mission from Pope was to find Gervase before he could harm Maundsley. Looking the other way, it was my duty as an upright citizen - well, a not-far-off vertical citizen - to report suspicion of crime to the police. If I believed Gervase wielded the knife that slashed Clapham's throat I should speak up.

  But the question was: did I believe it?

  At the moment, I could feel my mind being stretched like someone was making a twisty cat's cradle inside my head. This needed a bit of thinking about.

  And the newsroom was the wrong place to do it. Not least, because if I sat at my desk, Figgis would find some reason to question me about my progress.

  So instead, I slipped down the Chronicle's backstairs into the machine room. The mighty rotary presses had just started to print the midday edition. Normally, I'd pause to watch the magic as a huge roll of newsprint raced through the rollers, sliced through the cutters, was clamped by the folders, and came out the other end as newspapers. But not today. I flitted past the rumbling presses and through the door which led into the publishing yard. The first papers were being loaded into vans and driven off to newsagents and street-corner sellers.

  I nodded at a couple of guys doing the hefting, slipped out of the back gate, and walked round to Marcello's.

  It was a late September morning. The town had its rough edges blurred by an autumnal haze. Brighton looked like a painting in which the colours had run together. After all, this was the season of mists. But, as far as I was concerned, not much mellow fruitfulness.

  Marcello's had worked up its early morning fug. Equal parts of bacon fumes, cigarette smoke and tea urn steam. The place was crowded with the breakfast rush. A group of bus conductors swigged tea at the back and swopped stories about life on the number thirty-one to Worthing. An office type in grey suit and striped tie ate his scrambled egg like a mouse chewing a nut. A couple of secretaries at the window table slurped coffee from glass cups and chattered over the knitting patterns in Woman's Realm.

  I stepped up to the counter, ordered a coffee and took it to a free table at the back.

  I took a sip, sat back, and tried to think about the predicament Pope had landed me in.

  Damn the man!

  Who did he think I was? Philip Marlowe?

  But there wasn't much point in getting angry about it. I needed to think logically. Pope clearly believed that his brother posed a real threat to Maundsley. His Holiness would have regarded it as an act of self-humiliation to parade his personal problems to Figgis - knowing they'd be passed on to me. But if Gervase was planning to kill Maundsley, why had he vanished in advance of the act? Surely that would only draw attention to himself. It had raised his brother's suspicions. And if Maundsley was killed, it meant Gervase could have to account for his movements while he was missing.

  On the other hand, perhaps Gervase was playing a subtler game. Maybe the vanishing act was designed to provide him with a false alibi. So when Maundsley was murdered, Gervase could supposedly prove he was somewhere else. As far as his vanishing act was concerned, it was impossible to reach the truth of the matter.

  I drank some more of my coffee and considered the other puzzle. The question of Clapham's killing.

  There wasn't a shred of hard evidence as far as I knew that Gervase had killed Clapham. At lea
st, no evidence yet. But if Gervase were planning to attack Maundsley, killing Clapham first would be a stupid thing to do. It would warn Maundsley that he might be in danger. Yet when the red mist of murder enters their mind, killers don't act with cool logic. And, perhaps, Gervase was intent on a killing spree.

  I drained the last of my coffee and clunked the cup back in the saucer.

  Thinking through the matter had led me to a clear conclusion. If I stood any chance of finding Gervase, I needed to know more about him.

  And the best place to start would be inside his apartment.

  Three hours later I was standing outside Gervase's apartment overlooking Brighton seafront.

  I had permission to enter. But getting it hadn't been easy. You'd have thought I was asking to sneak into the jewel house at the Tower of London and help myself to the royal sceptre and orb. I'd phoned Figgis from Marcello's to tell him what I wanted to do. He'd spluttered a bit but finally agreed to ask Pope. When Figgis called me back, he'd said he'd seen Pope and had the most uncomfortable ten minutes of his life. But His Holiness had reluctantly agreed. He would call Gervase's housekeeper, one Estelle Daventry, who would let me into the apartment and oversee my visit.

  I didn't like the sound of that. I was hoping to have a quiet nose about. I didn't want a fussy housekeeper flicking her feather duster around me. But I didn't have much choice.

  So I opened the door and entered a small vestibule which served all the apartments in the building.

  The place was painted a pale green colour. The walls were hung with a couple of seascapes. To my right, some stairs led to the upper floors. The place had a damp feel with the kind of whiff you get in swimming baths.

  In front of me was a lift door. Beside the door was a telephone. A typed note next to the telephone read: "Lift for Penthouse Suite only. To gain admittance, raise receiver and dial 1."

  I carried out the instructions to the letter.

  The phone was answered after three rings by a woman with a reedy voice.

  She said: "If you're that journalist personage I've been told to expect, enter the lift and press the button for the penthouse. You should be able to manage that. There's only one."

  I'd have liked to ask whether she meant one button or one penthouse, just to rile her. But she'd already slammed down the receiver.

  I stepped into the lift and pressed the button wondering how much trouble I was going to get from the sarcastic number upstairs.

  The lift opened on a room furnished like the lounge of a luxury hotel. There were chintzy over-stuffed armchairs and chunky sofas you could have kipped on all night. There was a glass-fronted cabinet packed with figurines and a gilded occasional table. (If it's a table occasionally, what is it the rest of the time, I wondered?) A lot of the furniture looked like the stuff that's named after one of those French Kings Louis. I can't remember which one - there were too many of them.

  Estelle Daventry was standing beside the lift with her arms folded like I was Old Lucifer who'd just rode the elevator up from Hades. She was a slight woman with an unusually long neck, nothing like a giraffe's, but not far off a turkey's. She had a narrow face with thin lips and deep-set eyes. Her brown hair had started to grey and was tied back in a severe bun. She was wearing a tailored grey skirt and blouse with black court shoes.

  I extended my hand and said: "That lift must be a boon when you've got heavy shopping to lug up here."

  Estelle looked at my hand like it was covered with boils. She said: "Our provisions are delivered by the grocer's boy."

  I resisted the temptation to wring her long neck. Instead, I stepped firmly into the room to make it clear I intended to stay. I walked over to the window and looked out. The apartment commanded a grandstand view of the Sussex coast. The early morning mist had lifted. To the east, I could see as far along the coast as the white cliff of Seaford Head. To the west, smoke from Southwick power station drifted in the air. Through the smoke, I could pick out the outline of Worthing Pier.

  I turned to Estelle. "Gervase must have had pressing business elsewhere to want to give up a view like this."

  Estelle sniffed. "I don't enquire into his business. And it's Mr Pope to you."

  I said: "At the moment, there are more Popes in my life than in the Vatican. So for the purpose of this investigation the Pope who lives here is Gervase."

  Estelle sniffed again.

  I asked: "When did you last see Gervase?"

  "It was three days ago. I served him his dinner - liver and bacon, boiled potatoes and cabbage - and left him to eat it in the dining room. When I returned to clear his dinner plate and give him his pudding - treacle tart and custard - he was gone."

  "Had he left in the middle of a meal before?"

  Estelle crossed to one of the armchairs and sat down. "No. But I thought he may have gone out to a meeting he'd forgotten to mention to me."

  I perched on a chunky sofa without being invited.

  Beside the sofa was a table with some pictures in silver frames. Gervase with his mum and dad. Gervase with a dog. Gervase dressed in a Harrow School uniform - blue jacket, light grey trousers and a Harrow Hat, a straw boater effort with a blue band which used to make the lads look like juvenile 1930s FBI agents.

  I switched my attention back to Estelle. "Was Gervase a forgetful man?"

  "No."

  "What was he like that evening? Did he seem worried about anything?"

  "I wasn't privy to the thoughts going through his mind," Estelle said stiffly.

  "But you've known him for a good many years?"

  "We first met nearly thirty years ago. I've been his housekeeper for eighteen."

  And only his housekeeper, I wondered. But I wasn't planning to open that box of trouble just yet.

  Instead, I said: "I've been told that Gervase had developed a strong dislike of Sir Oscar Maundsley. In fact, he hated the man. Did you know about that?"

  I watched as Estelle's body stiffened. "Yes," she said.

  "Presumably, you know why. About how Gervase was interned during the war on the evidence of letters he'd written. Letters which Maundsley gave to the authorities to secure his own release."

  "I am well aware of that. I was also interned. I was mentioned in the same letters."

  That had my attention. "So you both hate Maundsley?" I asked.

  "We see him for what he is. He uses the cause for his own purposes. But the cause is bigger than one man - certainly bigger than Maundsley."

  I've never been much taken with people who espouse causes. They usually make a bloody nuisance of themselves. And I decided I could get to dislike Estelle a lot. But I had a job to do. So I put my views to one side and tried out my winning smile.

  I said: "Gerald Pope thinks that his brother is planning to kill Maundsley. Do you believe that, too?"

  "Maundsley will meet his fate in good time, with or without the help of Mr Gervase Pope."

  "Do you want to kill Maundsley?"

  Estelle sat up defiantly. "I would like to. But how could I?"

  Well, wanting to kill someone isn't a crime. If it were, I'd have been hanged years ago.

  But I wasn't sure where this was getting me. I needed a moment to think. I turned and looked out of the window. Took in the view for a moment. Close to the horizon, a tramp steamer was chugging down the English Channel.

  I refocused on Estelle and decided to try shock tactics.

  I said: "Do you love Gervase?"

  Estelle's eyes flashed like warning beacons. She stood up and strode across to the window. Stared out to sea.

  Without turning to face me, she said quietly: "I serve him as best I can."

  "That's what I hoped. You can serve him best by telling me anything unusual that happened in the days leading up to Gervase's disappearance."

  Now Estelle turned towards me. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were moist. Estelle didn't strike me as the type who shed many tears.

  "Have there been any unexpected callers at the apartment in
the last few days?"

  "No, we live quietly."

  "Did Gervase receive any letters he wasn't expecting?"

  "He receives post regularly, perhaps half a dozen letters a day."

  "But nothing unusual?"

  "There was one letter, the day before he disappeared. Normally, Mr Pope asks me to deal with his regular post - bills, invitations and so on. But he took this one into his study and locked it in his desk drawer. That was unusual."

  "Did you happen to notice from the envelope's postmark where it had been posted?"

  "I didn't get the opportunity. Mr Pope collected the letters from downstairs that morning."

  "Did you notice what the envelope was like?"

  "I could see it was good quality, made out of thick textured paper. Later, Mr Pope went out and I noticed he was taking a letter of his own to the post. Often he asked me to post his letters for him."

  "And you think that could have been a reply to the letter he'd received?"

  Estelle shook her head. "I don't know, but I suppose it could've been."

  "And he posted that letter the day before he left?"

  "Yes."

  I thought about that for a moment, then said: "Let's go back to the evening when he left. You mentioned you'd served his dinner - liver and bacon, I think."

  "Yes."

  "And he left after eating it but before you served his pudding?"

  "Yes."

  "And nothing unusual happened between serving the first course and the second?"

  "No. Wait. There was a telephone call."

  "You answered the phone?"

  "No. I was in the kitchen. Mr Pope must've picked up the extension in the dining room."

  "So you don't know who made the call?"

  "No."

  "Or what was said?"

  "No."

  "But Gervase left after taking the call without saying anything to you?"

  "Yes."