Post Mortem

Book 441: Murder Room

by Guy Cullingford

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Who killed Gilbert Worth? The official verdict was suicide, but those that knew him best thought he was not the type to take his own life. Furthermore, before his death, a missing gun, a half-written letter and two 'accidents' had convinced Worth that someone was trying to kill him. Worth's family and mistress all had motives and opportunity, and those close to him have their own ideas as to how he was murdered. And one occupant of the house in particular has a good reason for wanting to identify the killer . . .

Release date: November 14, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 221

Sample

I AM a writer and a moderately successful one—though far indeed from being the cornerstone of a crime club or the pillar of a popular publishing
concern. It is true that certain aspects of the kind of murder story which deans and dons write under whimsical pen names arouse my interest (elementary psychology is an essential study for all who
follow the trade of novelist); but for myself I prefer to cast my modest pearls before the more reflective and cultivated of my fellows.

I have my own public, and they have remained faithful to me in their fashion. Luckily for their diminished purses my output is small: I reckon to complete a book every three years.

I need scarcely say that I am fortunate enough not to have to rely on my own exertions to keep myself and my family: they would long ago have been in the gutter—or rather become yet
another charge on the taxpayer—if they had been dependent on my literary earnings.

I am a writer, and the natural reaction of a writer is to set forth his troubles in words. He may heighten them a little, and bestow them on a character of his own imagining, but out they must;
and once he has committed them to paper they lose their power to mortify him—or so I believe—and may instead even bring him profit. But as I am not engaged here in transmuting my
troubles into royalties, I need only state them as briefly as possible without employing subterfuge or exaggeration.

Quite plainly then it is obvious that some member of my household is out for my blood.

How absurd it looks written down . . . but now that I have put it where it belongs, amongst the paper covers, I already feel better. It should not take long to set down the reasons which support
this fantastic notion. For there are reasons. I may be sensitive to atmosphere, but it is facts, hard facts, which have led me to question the safety of my life. My life! Aye, there’s the
rub. I grudge them that. And why should anyone wish to take it from me? I’m no petty dictator or domestic tyrant. Everyone in my family is free to come and go at will, and I can scarcely be
blamed if I extend the same privilege to myself. As for the servants—to-day they are the masters; if there is anything about my employ of which they do not approve, they have only to leave
me—they do not have to kill me to effect their escape.

Observe how already by this process of putting thoughts into words progress has been made. The housemaid, the cook and the parlourmaid stand cleared of suspicion. So does the gardener, unless he
is harbouring some motive of revenge with his ill-conceived political opinions.

‘Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark.’ That, or something like it, is the way Bacon embarks upon a well-reasoned essay. But his statement is outmoded by the times.
Whatever may be said to the contrary, it is plain that science and religion can never go hand in hand, they are completely contradictory. The scientist who clings to his religion is so much less
the scientist; the man of religion who confesses to a belief in scientific evidence has by the extent of that belief forfeited an equal amount of his creed. The faithful may still fear death as
children fear to go in the dark; there is nothing for me to do but to accept it as an inevitable and complete finis, and to delay the event for as long as possible. The child who knows
that the dark is endless can only dig in its heels and wait to be dragged into the eternal night.

So far there have been two attempts on my life. That is, two which have come to my notice. There may have been others too tentative for success and too slight for observation. Now I look back I
may perhaps have had more than my proper share of small indispositions or casual mishaps. That is the worst of this business. Suspicions once aroused are as unreliable as ferrets which are apt to
pursue their underground activities in empty, profitless burrows. I shall try then to dismiss all earlier speculation and concentrate on the circumstantial evidence provided by what may be
described as the turret-room problem.

The house in which I live with my family is the one in which my father lived before me. It is entirely Victorian and like many of that period a blend of the solid and grotesque. There was really
no occasion for the architect to crown his comfortable, red-brick mass with a fly-away, copper-roofed hexagonal turret. From outside it looks frankly crazy and is only useful as an identifying sign
to give to strangers seeking one out from an address. As for the accommodation it affords, I believe it was never used except as a lumber room until I adopted it as my sole property because I knew
I could reckon on being absolutely undisturbed there. Unlike those lady novelists who, I understand, can write in their laps with their infants gambolling round their feet, it has always been
necessary for me to have complete quiet for my work. A pneumatic drill in a street half a mile away paralyses me, and a gardener at work with an axe in a neighbouring garden lops my thoughts away
as effectively as the branches.

I soon saw the possibilities of the turret room in its isolation from the rest of the household. Not only is it well above the servants’ bedrooms, but it is served by its own staircase
sealed off by a good, solid Victorian door.

There are some advantages in being stranded in a decaying suburb where houses were built to conform to a different standard of living to that which obtains nowadays. Luckily their construction
is too contorted to admit of them being converted into flats like their Georgian equivalents, so the neighbourhood has escaped the fate of being turned into a middle-class slum. For us, a family
with individual tastes, this house has the merit of being roomy; we should never have been able to live together without space for our temperaments. Moreover we are fortunate in being able to
retain the services of domestics who are not frightened of stairs. They are paid accordingly, and my wife has always been an excellent manager. Now, I wonder . . .

But let us return to the subject of stairs. The staircase to the turret is as firm as a rock, and just about as treacherous to climb. Everyone in the house knows that, and I know it as well as
anyone, for I use it regularly. It has, for no reason at all, a corkscrew turn three steps from the top. It is carefully carpeted in the Victorian manner, with brass stair rods and Turkish carpet;
the same carpet which was there when I was a child. I don’t suppose that it will ever wear out. The electric light, which was not there at that time, is placed so that the light bulb comes
exactly over the twist in the stairs. There is no banister but a thick red cord, rather like a swollen bell-cord, is looped with brass fixtures at intervals down the wall. This is also as it used
to be in my father’s time. I have never treated the stairs to the turret with contempt. When I come down from working late, I always switch on the light from the top of the stairs and put my
hand on the red cord.

One Tuesday night, three weeks ago, I pressed down the switch and nothing happened. I swore under my breath, but took no further notice. Naturally I had no thought of anything being amiss other
than a burned out bulb. I took hold of the red cord a little more fimly than usual, and came down hard in the sooty dark. Something skidded under my foot, and I went down violently onto my spine,
still clutching the massive cord which wrenched away one brass fitting from the wall, but otherwise remained comfortingly substantial. I was no more than badly jarred. We must have made a bit of a
racket, the brass fitting and I, but no one heard through the stout, well-fitting door at the bottom of the stairs. I got up and felt my way down the rest of it, breathing fire and vengeance. It
was a brass stair rod, of course. Jenkins had been cleaning them and the fool hadn’t put it back properly. Naturally I wasn’t prepared to dismiss her; no one dismisses a servant
nowadays unless they put steel filings in the soup. But I felt she deserved something special in the way of a reprimand, and I flatter myself that I have the ability to make such people squirm
without their actually knowing the reason why they find the encounter so painful; a useful accomplishment in democratic times.

As soon as I opened the door at the bottom of the stairs I was able to see from the light on the bedroom corridor. I went on down to my own bedroom with the idea of brushing my clothes, but when
I opened the drawer to get the clothes brush I saw beside it, my electric torch. I don’t know quite what put it into my head, but I picked up the torch instead of the brush and went back. I
had no suspicions then, I simply wanted to see what damage had been done, and had a vague idea that I might have dropped something out of my pockets. But I had not had a marble in my pocket. The
curious thing was that the rod wasn’t out of its sockets at all. So that there was really only one thing to blame Jenkins for . . . the burned-out lamp . . . and lamps do burn out from time
to time.

‘All I can say is, it was working all right when I done the stairs’, said Jenkins sullenly. She is a peculiarly disagreeable girl but a good servant on the whole.

‘You needed the light for your labours, then? You are not worried by any considerations of patriotism or public spirit when you draw on the nation’s reserves at the peak
period?’

‘You can’t see to do them stairs without a light, not any time of the day.’

‘I am not reproaching you, Jenkins. Far from it. I am just, let me see, how shall I put it? . . . testing your reactions. The light was in perfect working order when you were brushing down
the stairs?’

‘I said so once, and I say so again, sir.’

‘Then if that was the case, why didn’t you see that you had left behind you a glass marble on the stair tread directly under the bulb?’

‘A glass marble, sir?’

‘Such as children use. An alley is the slang term for it, I believe.’

‘I never had such a thing in me life, sir’, the girl replied indignantly. ‘What should I do with a thing like that?’

‘And you have no young brothers at home from whom you might have acquired such an object?’

‘My parents never had but the one.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Then we can rule out that possibility.’

She looked sharply at me with her little pig’s eyes. I think she mistrusted my affability. But it did appear as if she knew nothing of the marble.

‘I must have been mistaken’, I said. ‘I thought that I felt the sole of my bedroom slipper come in contact with some smooth round object. I had quite a tumble, you
know.’

‘And I hope you hurt yourself’, her eyes said while her lips did not move from their habitual droop.

‘It will need the handyman to repair the wall fitting. Will you see to that as soon as possible?’

‘I’ll do my best, sir. It may mean waiting a day or two.’

‘Well, when the handyman sees fit to offer us the inestimable benefit of his services, let him do it.’

‘Will that be all, sir?’

‘As far as you are concerned, yes. But replace the bulb immediately. Thank you, Jenkins.’

How she hates me! But who would pay her excellent wages if I were dead?

My two sons may be puerile in many ways, but they have outgrown the use of marbles, or at least the accepted use. Six years ago, the younger, Robert, might have been capable of
putting a marble on a stair as a practical joke; but Robert is now nearly twenty-one, and takes himself more seriously than he will do when he is twice the age.

His brother is twenty-seven, and presumably a man in everything except in being able to maintain himself. His education has been long and expensive, and one would imagine to some purpose, but no
one can think what the purpose is, least of all Julian himself. Sometimes he feels that he is getting a vague notion about it. At such periods he will embark on a definite course of study, only to
discover a few weeks later that he has been misled. The only thing that would settle Julian’s career for him would be a full-scale war, and that solution seems a little harsh on the rest of
us. The one road I have closed to him definitely is that of authorship. I will not have two of us in the family, nor shall he use my small achievements as a stepping-stone to his own success.
Otherwise he can do as he likes—for six months. Then I shall kick him out.

I have often pondered over the true attitude of a father to his sons, as opposed to the conventional one. I have never felt the slightest shade of affection for either of my boys since they
turned three years of age. I have felt a certain amount of pride in their achievements at school as they reflected on my parental status, and all along I have been interested in them
psychologically. That is the most I can say. And what have they ever wanted from me but money, first in the form of expensive toys, then of expensive hobbies and thirdly in solid cash?

As for my daughter Juliet, I imagine that had she been anything but the dim echo of her mother, I might have cared for her more. But I have seen it done once already, only better. Who cares for
a second performance by an inferior company?

We will leave the marble; drop it in the drawer in company with the clothes brush and the electric torch, and proceed to the second episode; the affair of the night-time
milk.

Some writers do their best work before breakfast, I do mine in the evening and at night. That is, creatively. Of course I can correct proofs in the morning or read in the afternoon, but the
first writing draft I can usually only do after dinner. A matter of habit perhaps; practically the whole of life is a question of habit, good and bad. In my father’s time it would have been
easy to have persuaded some member of the domestic staff to keep my night vigil with me in order to be at hand to attend to my needs. Autres temps, autres mœurs, and now I have to
make picnic arrangements unless I wish to take my diminished energies unrefreshed to bed. In other words, a thermos flask of milk is taken up to the turret room earlier in the evening, and I keep
some biscuits in a tin like an old lady in a boarding house. The thermos is filled in the kitchen, but it is not filled by the cook; it is filled by my secretary who also is responsible for seeing
that it reaches its destination. In this I do not aim to please the cook, but myself. If I must have hot milk out of a thermos flask, I prefer it as untainted as possible, and I do not trust to the
ordinary servant to take the necessary precautions to ensure this result. To begin with, the flask must be absolutely sterilized and so must the cork. A perfectly fresh piece of greaseproof paper,
and not a hastily torn off twist from a packet which has been lying about in a kitchen drawer accumulating dust, must then be placed on the end of the cork to prevent it from contaminating the milk
with its odour.

My palate is peculiarly sensitive; I have not destroyed it by the pernicious habit of smoking, and because of that abstention I am alive to-day.

A week had elapsed from the night when I met with an accident on the stairs and, on the fallacious assumption that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. I had felt perfectly safe on
the stairs ever since. But I had begun to be a little careful otherwise, and when at the first sip of milk I thought that I detected a faint foreign flavour, although it was by no means
undrinkable, I did not drink it.

I have never been fond of domestic animals, as it has always seemed to me that domestication has deprived them of any praiseworthy traits they may have originally possessed. But that does not
necessarily debar me from benevolent intentions towards them from time to time. On this occasion I went down several flights of stairs simply for the purpose of giving my evening’s supply of
milk to the kitchen cat. No cat starves in a kitchen, and this one is no exception to the general rule, but it is incurably greedy. It looked a stupid cat, and I have never had reason to doubt the
conclusions to be drawn from its appearance. It stared at me blankly as I poured out the milk into a pie-dish from the larder. I had allowed the liquid to cool upstairs, but I did not think it
essential to stop to watch it consumed. I went up to bed and left it to its potations. Next morning cook discovered it dead.

For certain reasons which will appear later, I did not immediately suspect my secretary of malice aforethought, although I did not entirely eliminate her from the list of suspects. Of all people
she obviously had the best opportunity to tamper with the milk. However, the flask may have been in the kitchen at the mercy of any ill-disposed person for anything from ten minutes to half an
hour. Having filled it, it is not to be supposed that she refused to let it out of her sight. She may well have brought it half-way; perhaps left it in the dining-room while she put on her outdoor
clothes to go home, and then brought it up to the turret room just before she left. I made no special inquiries, neither did I explain the emptied pie-dish which was found beside the cat. I had no
need for excuses. If anyone else had, let them come forward.

Since then I have been taking the affair seriously. We are all of us apt to have criminal intentions occasionally. The impulse is usually given by some specific act on the part of one of our
associates. If the impulse is strong enough and the character weak enough, an abortive attempt at murder may result. I may, unintentionally of course, have infuriated some member of my household
sufficiently for them to have put a dud bulb into a lampholder and a marble on the stairs without much more than a sneaking half-baked hope that disaster would arise from the combination. But what
we had now was something different. It was a definite effort at extermination, a policy pursued with a determination only to be equalled by the resolution of the intended victim not to be
exterminated.

Were the attempts masculine or feminine? The first perhaps had a hint of masculinity, but poisoning is usually feminine. The first I had been inclined to attribute to Julian; we had had words
not long before, but the second, unless it was a move to incriminate the innocent and make two victims instead of one, was not so easy to classify. Yet it was necessary to come to a decision in
order to apprehend what the next development was likely to be. If a man who prides himself on his understanding of psychology is unable to decide on the type of mind which could conceive and put
into operation these two simple actions, it is obvious that he has failed at his studies. I thought that I had an exact knowledge of all the types of mind in my household. I have used them as
models often enough. I should not like to admit that I am defeated so easily.

My wife, my two sons, my daughter, my mistress, my friend or, stretching a point, my servants. . . . One of these is guilty of attempted murder.

Which?

In the meantime I have looked out my old army revolver and loaded it. I do not for a minute suppose that I shall have need of it, but it is the only gun in the house, and I
would rather have it in my own possession than elsewhere.

IN THE mornings I hand over the occupation of the turret-room to my secretary, who uses her undisturbed possession of it to type any notes and
manuscript I may have left there the previous evening.

My secretary is also my mistress, a combination of duties which seems to suit her, and is not without its conveniences. Rosina Peck is her name, and she comes from a background of poorly-paid
office workers, semidetached villas, a secondary education and a commercial college. Little Rosina, who I am inclined to fancy, started life as plain Rosie, may not be the ideal secretary (she is
quite unable to spell), but she is the ideal mistress. Beneath a veneer of sophistication of about the depth of that which obtains on a cheap ‘bedroom suite’, she is as simple and
enthusiastic as a good-natured child. Take Rosina to a large and expensive cinema, buy her a meal in an inferior Italian restaurant with a bottle of cheap wine, run her back to her home afterwards
in a car—putting her down at the corner of the road near her parents’ modest house in the interests of respectability—and her gratitude is overwhelming. As long as it is what she
calls the ‘West End’, she is satisfied. I have had more fun with little Rosina Peck for less money than with anyone else in my life. Added to this zest for innocent entertainment, she
looks perfectly charming. Her salary, of which she pays over half towards her mother’s housekeeping, is no larger than it would be elsewhere, but her natural taste is admirable. My
wife’s dress allowance for a month would keep Rosie in clothes for a year, and yet she always manages to look the smarter of the two; at a distance anyway. She apparently has a friend in t. . .