Death of a Beauty Queen (16 page)

Bobby was aware of a possibly unjust suspicion that in time past Miss Perry herself had done a little private examining on her own account of her niece's belongings and had not found much to reward her curiosity. He said carelessly: ‘Well, one never knows. Sometimes even an old bill or a picture postcard gives us a hint where to look. Or you might be able to help us. Even the most trifling detail might turn out important. But I don't suppose it's likely there's anything much you can tell us.' Leaving this remark to sink in, he added: ‘I'm admiring that picture of Hamlet over the mantelpiece. Oil, isn't it? Is it a portrait?'

‘My father,' Miss Perry explained. She named an actor well known in his day, but forgotten now – Bobby, for instance, had never heard of him. ‘He toured his own company, she went on, with nicely adjusted pride and regret. ‘Lost every penny he had doing it, too. The Perrys – of course that wasn't the name he used on the stage – and the Irwins are both Brush Hill families. Leslie Irwin's grandfather was a member of my father's company at one time.'

‘Really?' exclaimed Bobby, interested. ‘That's peculiar – an odd coincidence.' He did not see that the fact could have much bearing on the recent tragedy, but it seemed strange. ‘Curious to think of their grandfathers – Leslie Irwin's and Miss Mears's – being colleagues so long ago.'

‘If you call it being colleagues,' said Miss Perry, a little stiffly. ‘Of course, it was father's own company, and he always played leads while Irwin only took small parts – very small parts.'

‘He wasn't a very successful actor, then?' Bobby asked.

‘No talent whatever,' pronounced Miss Perry. ‘I've heard father say so himself – he always said that was the difficulty that wrecked him, finding any supporting talent. And Irwin had less even than most. But all the Irwins are like that. They've all got the theatre in their blood, but none of them can act.'

‘I thought Mr Irwin – Leslie Irwin's father, I mean – was very strict in his views. I was told he had never before even been in a cinema, and never in a theatre since he was a child and his father took him.'

‘He didn't dare,' said Miss Perry.

‘Really? Do you think it was that?'

‘I do. He didn't dare. I've never been in a theatre for years – I wouldn't go if you paid me. But that's because I know it too well – sickened me, it has. But Paul was afraid. He knew what the theatre did to his father.'

‘That's extraordinarily interesting,' Bobby said. ‘But wasn't he – the father, I mean – wasn't he the founder of the Brush Hill Building Society?'

‘He was,' agreed Miss Perry, ‘but that was after he left the stage, because no one would have anything to do with him anymore.'

‘Was he as bad as all that?'

‘It wasn't his acting. It was because one of the ladies of the company – well, at the inquest they brought it in accidental death. She was found at the bottom of some steps with her neck broken. Stone steps and slippery, and so they brought it in an accident. Only there was talk – a lot of talk. He had to give evidence – Paul s father, I mean. Accidental death, the verdict was, but after that no one wanted him anymore.'

'So he had to give up acting?'

‘Yes. And started the Brush Hill Building Society. But he always hankered after the theatre, and, though he had no chance of an engagement after what had happened, he could still take an interest in new productions and so on. Find money to back them sometimes.'

‘He still had some money, then?'

‘Not a penny.'

‘Well, then...?'

‘Ah,' said Miss Perry, and was taken by a violent fit of coughing. When she recovered, she said slowly: ‘There were stories got about. Not so much in Brush Hill itself. In Brush Hill they don't know much about theatre business. But people in the profession wondered. In Brush Hill they didn't know he was even interested in stage affairs, but the profession knew he was secretary and manager of a building society. After a time Brush Hill people did begin to get a little uneasy, but he was clever with figures, and he had a stock of funny stories and a way of telling them. They used to say in Brush Hill a general meeting of the Building Society was as good as a play – he kept the shareholders and depositors laughing all the time, and, if anyone asked an awkward question, he didn't answer it, he just told another funny story and everybody laughed and the question was forgotten. Then he took a chill, walking home in the rain after a first night he had put money in that was as bad a flop as could be. He was dead from pneumonia in twenty-four hours, and Paul had to take his place. Paul was only twenty-two, but there was no one else to do it, for there was no one else could understand the books. They had been kept in what was almost a kind of shorthand, but Paul said he could straighten them out – and so he did, only it took time. Some of the committee backed him and some didn't, but he hung on, fighting all the time, and the more those against him tried to down him, the harder he fought back. Once they all turned on him and told him to resign. He refused flatly. He said they had the power to dismiss him, but if they used it they would be in bankruptcy in twenty-four hours – and there wouldn't be much left for the sweeping up, either. But he told them he could save them, and he would, though only if they left him alone. So they did. Every night I could see his light burning in his office – that was in the old place, before the new building was put up. He was secretary, manager, cashier, clerk, office-boy – everything. He wouldn't have anyone else in the office – not then. It s different now – a big staff they've got; but the first time I knew he had won through was when he told me they were engaging two new clerks. There's many living yet in Brush Hill still remember how he worked like the tides that never rest or are still – twenty hours a day, often enough – until at long last the society was safe again.'

‘You think when his father died there was a deficiency?'

‘I think there was nothing else,' Miss Perry retorted. ‘I think it was all one huge deficiency. But he fought it out – dear Lord Christ, how he fought! Day and night, day after night, year after year – any little slip, any awkward question almost, any unsatisfied curiosity, and there was his father known for a thief and a forger, and the Building Society bankrupt, and half Brush Hill ruined – and gaol for himself, most like, though I don't believe he ever thought of that, but only of his father's name and all the little people in Brush Hill with all their savings for their old age all swept away. That's why he married.'

‘Married?'

‘Yes. There was one man who suspected – at least, perhaps others suspected, only they were willing to wait, and this man wasn't. The others hoped to save their money, and knew Paul was their only chance. But this man hadn't any money of his own in the Society, he was only a trustee for a fund he didn't care much about. Most likely he more than suspected. He had a daughter. She had no looks, a pasty-face and flat hair, and one shoulder higher than the other, and a tongue like a snake's. Nagged her father fit to drive any man to drink, and, what with her tongue and her looks, he had long ago given up any hope of ever getting her off his hands. Paul – Mr Irwin – I called him Paul then – Paul knew this man was going to insist on an investigation and he knew he had figures ready. Paul knew he was going to post a letter with them on the Wednesday to the chairman, ready for the committee meeting on the Thursday. That Wednesday evening Paul called and asked the girl to marry him. Jumped at him, she did. Her only chance, and she knew it, and she wasn't going to miss it, either. The chairman never got that letter, it was never posted.'

She lapsed into silence, and Bobby, profoundly interested as he was, was silent too, making no comment. He was wondering what part in this strange tale had been taken by the commonplace-looking old woman who had told it and sat there in her chair, wheezing, rheumatic, her bottle of medicine and her knitting by her side, looking as if none of the storms of life had ever troubled her dull repose, as if nothing but her medicine and her knitting had ever interested her.

‘That Wednesday,' she said abruptly, ‘before he proposed to the girl he married, he came and saw another girl. He told her what he was going to do. It was the last time they ever saw each other.'

She picked up her knitting and began to work at it. Bobby was still silent. She said:

‘They had one boy. When the child was seven or eight the wife died. Twenty years they had been married then. There had been another child before, but it died when it was a baby, Paul Irwin had strong feelings always – he loved, he hated, as he worked, with every ounce of energy and being that was in him. He hated – ah, hate's a little word for what he felt – he hated the Building Society. He had made it, sweated his life and more for it to make it what it is to-day, and, by all that he had given it, he hated it. He hated the theatre – hate's a tiny word, but there's no other – for what it had done to his father. You see, he had loved his father. His wife he neither loved nor hated – she was just a convenience, a useful gag to stop a babbling tongue. His son he loved – but love's a tiny word to use. For men like Paul, love and hate are words that are only shifting shadows of what they feel. Leslie's like that, too, the same kind, only as yet he doesn't know where his feelings belong – he's just a mass of unrelated feeling.'

‘You must have thought a great deal about all this,' Bobby said.

‘Young man,' she answered, ‘when you have nothing else to do by day and by night – by night above all – but think and think, then presently you come to understand.'

Bobby did not answer. He was musing on this strange, tragic tale of passion stifled, of love compelled, of a whole life controlled and forced to one determined end, of all that huge effort hidden behind what seemed the ordinary suburban life of a successful business man here, and there a commonplace calm domestic existence bounded by knitting and a picture paper and medicine from the doctor at the corner. How many, he wondered, of those one meets passing to and fro upon the daily routine of their affairs, could tell such tales of such fierce, prolonged endeavour, of such unending, desperate battle? How many old women wheezing in their armchairs by the fire as if they had never known life, as if the storms and trials of existence had passed them by entirely, had yet known such flame of thwarted passion as this one had endured?

He seemed to see behind the dull and commonplace facade of ordinary, everyday life, a seething tumult of passion and of lost endeavour. He said presently:

‘Did your niece, did Leslie Irwin know all this?'

‘No. Only that there was some kind of family connection. It was that brought them together in the first place. But Paul wouldn't hear of Leslie's marrying Carrie. He had suffered so much, he had endured so much, I think he felt he could not bear that as well. Besides, we should have had to meet again.'

‘You think that was the reason...?'

‘It wasn't only that. I think he was afraid Carrie would get Leslie into the theatre, and there was nothing he wouldn't have done to stop that. He thought the theatre meant ruin and destruction – body and soul and everything. He knew what the theatre had done to his father, and he thought it might be the same with Leslie. You see, he had lived all his life in fear, never knowing what the next moment might not bring. No wonder, I think, he preached always a God of fear and anger.'

Bobby looked at her.

‘You understand so well,' he said.

‘Young man,' she answered, ‘it is time I had my medicine. The glass is there just behind you, if you'll pass it.'

There was not much more passed between them before there arrived Inspector Ferris, very bustling and efficient.

With him, at first, Miss Perry seemed inclined to be more reticent, as if she had exhausted her emotions in outpouring to Bobby her memories of the past. To Ferris's questions her answers were brief, serving merely to confirm what was already known. On one point she was very clear. She knew nothing of the supposed engagement to Claude Maddox, and did not much suppose Carrie had ever really intended to marry him, though it was quite possible she had accepted attentions meaning more to him than to her.

‘Carrie was like that,' Miss Perry said. ‘She kept her own head so well she thought everyone else was the same.'

‘What about young Leslie Irwin?' Ferris asked. ‘Anything between him and her?'

‘Couldn't,' Miss Perry answered shortly. ‘She knew Leslie was dependent on his father, and she knew there was nothing he wouldn't have done to put a stop to that.'

‘Nothing, eh?' repeated Ferris, and somehow that one word served to invest Miss Perry's sentence with a strange and sinister significance. When she had used the same words before, they had seemed merely a conventional expression of extreme dislike, and so Bobby had accepted them. But now they seemed to mean much more as Ferris uttered his solitary word of comment, and Bobby looked startled and Miss Perry more than startled.

‘Oh, I didn't mean that,' she said. ‘Of course, I didn't mean that.'

‘Ever heard the old gentleman use threats? Or heard tell he had?' Ferris persisted.

‘No. Yes. No. Not like that. I haven't seen Paul – Mr Irwin I mean – not for twenty-nine years next March.'

Ferris looked a little surprised at the precision of this statement, but did not comment on it. Miss Perry, a little flustered, went on talking rapidly, as if by a flow of words to wipe out all recollection of the unlucky phrase she had used.

‘I don't believe,' she declared, ‘Carrie meant to marry anyone – not just yet, that is. She knew what she wanted – Hollywood. A star she meant to be. Thought with her looks it would be easy. Thought I was a jealous, spiteful old maid when I told her looks and talent, yes, and opportunity, too, all together may lead nowhere. She wouldn't believe all that's merely the least you must have to join in the gamble, and whether they win for you or not depends on the card that turns up. She thought what qualified you for entry meant you were sure to win, and it don't. It only gives you the right to try. But she didn't believe that – they never do, not the young ones. And it wasn't any man she wanted, but just two hundred pounds to pay for her fare to Hollywood, for a few smart frocks to take with her, and a little over to keep her in style while the fat contracts were being drawn up.'