Dead So Soon

by Richard Grindal

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The house in Chelsea was smart, in an unpretentious way. But when detective John Bryant rang the front door bell, he found neither intellect nor artistry; what lay before him was a world of curious contrasts - of extravagance and squalor, luxury and murder. Bryant follows his lads from a second-rate strip club, via a vast modern steelworks to the Seamen's Quarter in Amsterdam. Piece by piece the truth is uncovered and the mystery reaches a crescendo in a climax of violence against the brilliant colours of a sun-filled patio.

Release date: December 14, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 216

Sample

CHELSEA SQUARE was almost deserted in the early evening sunshine. Two girl students came up Manresa
Road from the direction of the Polytechnic. One wore black, woollen stockings and both of them had made themselves look pale, gaunt and interesting; about as interesting as fugitives from a
sanatorium.

Around the corner at the ‘Princess of Wales’ some drinkers were sitting at the tables outside, catching the last of the sunshine. I went and joined them. There were still fifteen
minutes to go before the time of my appointment.

As I sat with my pint of bitter I thought about the telephone call that had brought me out to work at seven-thirty on a Saturday evening. The case, if it turned out to be one, held little
promise of excitement.

The last nurse who had tried to hire me had been accused of steaming open her patient’s letters and wanted her name cleared. But the one who had telephoned me an hour earlier had refused
to talk business over the phone. All I knew about her was her name, Sheila Noakes, the address in Chelsea Square and that she had a youthful voice with an Australian accent.

There was one other thing. When I had suggested that she should come round to my office, she had declined.

‘It’s important that no one should know I am consulting you’, she had said.

‘Why should they?’

‘I’m being followed.’

‘Followed?’

‘Yes. Every time I leave the house to go anywhere I am followed. I’ve only noticed the man during the last week or so.’

The story didn’t impress me. Mentally I catalogued her case and filed my opinion away; frustrated spinster, unattractive, inferiority complex leading to persecution mania. But one could
never be sure. There might be something in it; blackmail, conspiracy, the frightened recourse of guilty people. The nagging doubt remained.

There was only one way to resolve it. I emptied my tankard, got up and walked back to Chelsea Square.

The house was small, symmetrical and neat, in red brick with white woodwork and leaded windows. At the front door there was a miniature portico, with two sham pillars set flush to the wall and a
single shallow step, which gave the whole house the flat, unreal appearance of a stage set. In spite of this it managed to look unpretentious and friendly; the kind of house that a rising young
actor might buy, or a publisher with intellectual aspirations.

To humour Miss Noakes’s desire for secrecy I was going to pretend I was a friend of hers; a man she had met on the boat coming from Australia. To add an authentic touch I had dropped in to
a florist down the King’s Road and picked up a dozen and a half yellow roses. I tucked them into the crook of my left arm as I rang the bell.

The girl who opened the door was tall, with an athlete’s figure and short, sun-bleached hair. She looked at me and then at her watch.

‘How wonderful to see you again, John!’ she said, loudly but convincingly.

I grinned back. ‘It’s been ages! What have you been doing with yourself?’

‘Come on in.’

‘How much time we’ve wasted!’ I exclaimed melodramatically, handing the roses.

She looked behind her and lowered her voice. ‘No need to overdo it’, she said stiffly.

I followed her through a small hallway to a room at the back of the house which overlooked the narrow strip of garden. It was furnished as a dining-room with a handsome oval table and
Hepplewhite chairs covered with yellow satin. From the wall at the end hung an original Watteau and a china cabinet in one corner of the room was richly stocked with Sèvres and Wedgwood.

She put the roses on the table and turned to face me. I studied her face a little more carefully. No one would have called it a beautiful face; the features were too square and too honest, the
nose too rounded. But it was a nice face and to set it off she had a figure that would have made a professor of Sanskrit burn down the Bodleian.

‘What seems to be the trouble?’ I asked her.

‘Do you know Isabelle Greenmore?’

To say that I knew Isabelle Greenmore would not have been strictly accurate, but I had heard of her. Eight or nine years ago there would have been few people who had not. About that time her
father Max Greenmore, the film magnate, impressario, gambler, racehorse owner, had died leaving her a fortune that ran more nearly into seven figures than six. For a few months she had provided the
gossip columns with their choicest headlines. Her name had been linked with that of a peer of royal blood; the sheik of an obscure Arab state had sent her as a gift a rare albino leopard; she had
been kidnapped by undergraduates of a minor university to raise funds for some unconsidered cause. And then quite suddenly she had faded from the social scene. Hearing her name again, I was mildly
astonished to realize how long it was since she had sunk into obscurity.

‘She must be thirty by now,’ I remarked thoughtfully.

‘Thirty-three.’

‘What has become of her?’

‘At the moment she’s upstairs.’ Sheila Noakes looked up at the ceiling above her. ‘She lives in this house.’

‘By herself?’

‘No, I live here too. They don’t allow Isabelle to live by herself any more.’

I considered this information and then asked her: ‘What’s her trouble? Pink elephants?’

‘There’s no point in denying that alcohol is part of the trouble, but she’s supposed to be mentally ill as well.’

‘By the way you said that, I gather you don’t believe she is.’

Her grey eyes looked at me steadily. She ignored my comment. Instead she went on: ‘Isabelle is being treated by a psychiatrist named Doctor Helen Proth. You may have heard of
her.’

I know nothing of doctors beyond the scandals I read in the Sunday papers and even less of psychiatry. The name of Doctor Proth didn’t mean a thing to me.

‘Suppose you tell me what’s on your mind.’

She told me that she was from Melbourne and that she had been in England for three years doing private nursing. Rather more than three months previously she had been engaged by Doctor Proth to
act as nurse to Isabelle Greenmore. It had been explained to her that the amount of medical nursing she would have to do would be small.

‘Are you supposed to keep her off the bottle?’ I asked.

‘That would be virtually impossible. It might even be dangerous to her health to try.’

‘So you wait until she passes out, catch her as she falls and put her to bed?’

‘More or less.’

‘Aren’t there homes where they can cure alcoholics?’

‘Isabelle has been to all the reputable ones and to a number that weren’t.’ She smiled without humour. ‘Now as a last resort they have turned to psychiatric
treatment.’

The cynicism in her voice made me look at her more closely. She was watching me shrewdly. It was at this moment that I realized she was more than a simple country girl from Wagga Wagga, or
wherever else Australian country girls come from. The masculine vitality of her body, the tanned skin and clear eyes had deceived me.

‘You still haven’t told me why you sent for me’, I reminded her.

‘The whole set-up in this house is odd, almost sinister. The fees that Dr. Proth is getting from this case are fantastic; out of all proportion to the medical care she is giving. I happen
to know that they run well into four figures a year. And it’s difficult to believe that she is making any serious attempt to cure Isabelle. Possibly she doesn’t want to cure her. After
all, no one wants to kill the milch cow. At all events there seems to be no explanation for some of the treatment she prescribes.’

‘There is no law against charging excessive fees if the patient is prepared to pay them.’

‘That’s just the point. Isabelle doesn’t actually pay. You see her inheritance is in the control of trustees. They allow her a small fixed income and nothing more. All her
living expenses, the rent of the house, clothes, medical fees, have to be approved and paid by the trustees.’

I was disappointed. Not because I had been expecting anything unusual, but because the girl’s story seemed to be only the mixture as before. A woman’s suspicions about another woman,
kindled no doubt by jealousy, resentment or any of another dozen feminine motives. The files of detective agencies are full of abandoned cases that have been launched on the unreliable slipway of a
woman’s tale; spinsters who thought their sisters were poisoning them; midwives who claimed that doctors were abortionists.

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked her. ‘Find out if there’s a racket and who is at the bottom of it?’

‘You make it sound so trivial.’

‘Perhaps it is.’

‘Possibly, but I don’t think so. I’m afraid for Isabelle. I can’t say exactly why. It is something that I sense rather than perceive.’

‘An aura of evil?’

‘Now you’re laughing at me!’

Her complaint was justified. I was laughing at her but not maliciously. It was only my mood. Perhaps the fact that I had been to Cooks that morning and fixed myself up with fourteen days holiday
in Alassio had something to do with it. It would be my first genuine, voluntary holiday in six years.

The thought of holidays reminded me that I would need every guinea I could get. She must have read my mind.

‘What would your fee be?’ she asked. I told her and she nodded as though the figure was more or less what she had expected. ‘When can you start?’

‘When do you want me to start?’

She looked at her wrist-watch and I noticed it was a gold Rolex Oyster. I had already mentally recorded that her blue, polka-dot dress, her shoes, were well chosen and expensive. As a profession
nursing must have moved a long way up since the days of Florence Nightingale.

‘Isabelle will probably be coming down soon,’ she said. ‘You could make a start by meeting her. If you are going to work on this case she had better get used to seeing you
around.’

‘Well, when we’re with her, remember I am a close friend of yours.’

‘Not too close’, she said quickly but not unkindly.

‘If I’m lucky time may remedy that.’

My compliment, if one could call it that, seemed to draw her attention to the roses which lay, still in their wrapping-paper, on the dining-table. She picked them up, parted the paper and held
them to her face to smell their perfume. My guess had been right when I ordered yellow roses. Roses did something for her, bringing out a feminine delicacy which had been hidden before by her
sun-tanned air of health and vitality. Besides, yellow was right for those grey eyes.

‘I must go and put these in water’, she said.

While she was out of the room I crossed to the window and looked out on the garden. It was small but carefully tended; half a dozen shaped flower beds and an oval lawn bordered on three sides by
a brick wall. Dwarf peach trees had been trained against the wall, on each side of a straggling grape vine.

As I stood there I heard the door behind me open. I looked round. The woman who had come in wore an old flowered dressing-gown and felt slippers. Her hair was lank and unkempt, her face lined
and colourless. She looked as though she had just awoken from an uncomfortable sleep in a not particularly wholesome bed.

She was either not surprised to see me in the room or too indifferent to care.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she asked me.

Her voice was flat and toneless. It could not have been the voice I remembered but some facial movement that had once been part of a smile or expression of pleasure, but was now only a
mannerism. Recognition came to me slowly and unwillingly.

‘You’re Isabelle Greenmore’, I said at last.

‘We’ve met before?’

‘No. But I’ve heard of you, of course.’

This time she did smile; a withered smile out of the past, so old and brittle, it might easily have crumbled into dust.

‘You have a good memory’, she said. ‘It’s been a long time since I was news.’

‘More than anything I envied you the albino leopard.’

It took an effort of concentration before she could remember about the leopard. Then she smiled again. ‘I would have gladly given it away. The beast was an awful bore; always sulking. And
there isn’t much one can do with a leopard.’

‘As far as I remember you once set it on an inquisitive reporter.’

‘You have got a wizard memory.’ She began to laugh again until the laugh got caught up in a cough and ended with her struggling painfully for breath.

‘Did you say you had got a fag?’ She asked when the spasm was over.

The slang she used, like everything about her, belonged to the past. Studying her face one could detect a resemblance to the face that had so often featured in the society magazines, but the
sharp, chiselled features had lost their outline so that the loveliness they once held was blurred and distorted. She pulled the flowered dressing-gown more tightly round her showing that her
figure was still slim and youthful. The hem of the dressing-gown itself was tattered and soiled.

‘I’m a friend of Sheila’, I remarked, handing her a cigarette and lighting it.

‘I hope you’re not going to be moral and disapproving’, she said playfully. ‘Too many people natter at me.’

‘Not me. I’m one of the original sinners, a hedonist or perhaps I just have no will-power.’

‘That’s good. I can see you and I will understand each other.’

‘Why not? We belong to the same generation. But people don’t know how to live any more.’

While I was speaking Sheila came back into the room carrying the roses which she had arranged in a slender, cut glass vase. She glanced quickly at Isabelle and then at me but said nothing.

Isabelle said to her: ‘Sheila, I like your friend. He’s nice.’ She turned to me and smiled. ‘Why don’t the three of us go out and have a drink round the corner? My
treat.’

‘Good idea’, I replied. ‘The drink I mean, not that you should pay for it.’

‘Then it’s settled. I’ll just run upstairs and change.’

She gave me another of her smiles and hurried from the room. Sheila crossed to the mantelpiece, stood the vase on it and began re-grouping the roses. Like everything else she did it with calm
efficiency, as though she knew with geometric certainty where every bloom should be placed.

‘Have you any idea who could be having you followed?’ I asked her. She shook her head.

‘Could it be Isabelle’s trustees?’ I went on.

‘What possible motive could they have?’

‘Where there’s a heap of money there’s always a motive.’

‘Are you suggesting that the trustees are involved in whatever may be going on?’

I grinned. ‘There’s nothing complicated about my way of working. I always think of the most likely, commonplace solution and then test it first. In most criminal cases it proves to
be the right one.’

‘Well, I imagine you’re on the wrong track this time.’

‘How many trustees are there?’

‘Three altogether but I don’t know all their names. The principal figure and the man who takes all the decisions is Lord Simonsbath. Apparently he was a very close friend of
Isabelle’s father.’

Lord Simonsbath was for me a name in the newspapers and nothing more. I seemed to remember that he was connected in some way with industry. He had served on a couple of those committees that
optimistic governments set up from time to time, in the fond hope that they may solve the nation’s economic problems by increasing productivity or cutting down industrial disputes.

‘Does Simonsbath take any personal interest in Isabelle’s affairs?’ I asked Sheila.

‘Oh, yes. He has always been very fond of Isabelle. Although he’s a busy man and his home is in the North of England he tries to see her at least once a month. He was round here a
couple of weeks ago.’ She paused for a moment and then held out her wrist towards me. ‘As a matter of fact he gave me this watch.’

I glanced at the Rolex Oyster. ‘Why?’

‘Because he was pleased with the way I was looking after Isabelle.’

‘Have you ever mentioned to him that you’re not entirely satisfied with the treatment Isabelle’s receiving?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

She appeared to weigh up my question before replying: ‘Lord Simonsbath has a very high opinion of Doctor Proth’s ability. He has told me so more than once. In the circumstances I can
scarcely suggest that she is incompetent. That would be both unprofessional and tactless.’

‘Isn’t there anyone else you could speak to? I seem to remember Isabelle had a sister?’

‘Yes, she has. Her name is Michaela, she’s married and lives near Sunningdale. In fact, I had thought of mentioning the whole matter to her. She’s very fond of Isabelle. But
I’m afraid she might think it presumptuous on my part.’

I looked at Miss Noakes quickly. There was nothing out of the ordinary in her final remark; no innuendo, as far as one could tell, no inference to be drawn. Her tone was measured, perfectly
under control. And yet one knew with certainty that she either hated or feared Isabelle’s sister.

ONE COULD tell that Isabelle Greenmore had been in the pub before from the silence that fell as soon as we walked into the
bar. There were not more than a dozen people in the room and they were too well-mannered to stare or to remain silent for long. But they shifted uneasily and then started to talk brightly,
pretending a little too hard not to care or to have noticed.

It was a pub not far from the Embankment that I never knew existed; small, obscure and difficult to find; a pub where discriminating people would wish to drink. I called up the first round of
drinks. Sheila and I had gin and tonic water. Isabelle asked for brandy.

Ten minutes upstairs in her house, a comb and a repaint job had effected a modest change in her appearance. Some of the dreariness had gone out of her face and a little colour, near enough to be
natural, had returned. The clothes helped; a biscuit-coloured costume tailored by someone in Bond Street with a flair for Parisian style; shoes and handbag that blended so well one scarcely noticed
them; a piece of costume jewellery that was as simple as it was expensive. She looked younger, more attractive and, unless one looked closely, healthy.

She took her brandy with a splash of soda and drank the first one slowly as though savouring its quality.

‘My father gave me the taste for brandy’, she remarked.

‘Was he a connoisseur?’

‘People used to say there were two men in England who knew more about brandy than him. And their interest was professional. I think he must have taught Micky and me about brandy while we
were still in the nursery.’

Talking about drink seemed not to cause her any concern at all. No one hearing her could possibly have suspected that she was under treatment for alcoholism. I almost began to believe that
Sheila must have exaggerated and that Isabelle’s weakness was nothing more vicious than a fondness for drinking like a man.

We had another round of drinks, two more after that and then I began to lose count. Sheila, I noticed, missed out on about every third round, discreetly stretching her drinks to cover up the
fact. I hadn’t eaten since midday and I began to feel the effects of the gin; nothing that I couldn’t control; a feeling of too amiable confidence and perhaps I was talking rather more
loudl. . .