The End Of Solomon Grundy (9 page)

“What has this got to do with Mrs Gresham’s daughter, Mr Kronfelder?”

“Doctor,” the big man said with his sweet smile. “I was a specialist in Stockholm – a doctor of the body before I understood that it is more important to cure the mind.”

There was a knock on the door. A large, shapeless middle-aged woman came in. “The Group of Second Servers are ready for you to address them, Doctor.”

“I shall be with them in five minutes. You know the rules, Irene, they will meditate together without speech. And when I go I wish you to take these gentlemen to Melicent. She is in her cell. You will see her quite alone,” he assured Manners, who nodded his head.

“You must forgive me for trying to interest you in our work, but I have made more unlikely converts than police officers.” Again that smile. “You asked what our work had to do with Sylvia. Simply this. She came here with her mother and father when she was eight years old, and stayed until she was sixteen. At that time it was decided that she should leave.”

“Who decided it and why?”

“The decision was taken by Melly and her husband Charles.”

“On your advice?”

“They consulted me, certainly.”

“And why was she – would expelled be the word?”

“Indeed it would not.” Doctor Kronfelder put his arms on the desk, leaned forward and stared direct at Manners while managing somehow to include Sergeant Jones also in his gaze. “We accept everything that happens in the universe, but we are striving always towards the ideal of supra peace. We recognise high spirits, youthful unruliness, fornication, but we cannot permit them to disrupt the life of our community. Sylvia was a liar, a fornicator, one who had no conception of any Way beyond the Way of pleasure. We decided that for some years her life should be passed in the world outside this Home.”

“We means you, isn’t that so, Doctor Kronfelder?”

The doctor shook his head. “In myself I am nothing. I am the expression of the General Will.”

Manners stood up. His voice was harsh. “I should like to see Mrs Gresham now.”

Kronfelder rose behind his desk. Jones, rather belatedly, got up too. “I want you to understand the position. Sylvia’s life here was over long ago. It can have nothing to do with her sad death. I hope there may be no need for public reference to her life here.”

He came out of the room with them and strode away along a passage. The shapeless Irene took them up two flights of stairs, answering almost monosyllabically their questions about the length of time she had been there and the sort of work she did. Her tongue seemed unlocked as they passed through a baize-covered door like that of a doctor’s waiting-room, into another part of the house. There were numbered doors on either side. An elderly man using a mop with a notable lack of enthusiasm smiled at them.

“These are the meditation cells,” Irene said. “We use them when someone wants to come to an important decision, or after they have had a shock. Like Melly now.”

Jones was walking beside her. “Did you know Estelle – Sylvia?”

“I knew her.” She said fiercely, “She was corrupt.”

“Corrupt?”

“She wished to defile everything.” She opened the door of room number eleven, said, “Here are the policemen,” and was gone.

The room was comfortable, shabbily but decently furnished, more like a bed-sitting-room than a cell for meditation. There were folkweave curtains and a bed with a cover in the same pattern. Melicent Gresham half-rose to greet them out of an arm-chair, then sank back into it. She was a fattish woman of fifty, with one of those good-looking, unlined, yet characterless faces frequently owned by those who have managed to absent themselves from the stresses of the world. She gestured with a plump ringless hand towards the other chair that the room contained. Manners took it. Jones sat down gingerly upon the bed.

Melicent Gresham’s voice was high, fluting, without depth, the voice of somebody present corporeally but in spirit half-absent.

“You’ll hardly believe me, Superintendent – Manners, isn’t it? – but I have had a presentiment that something was about to happen to Sylvia. I said so to Charles and to Percy, but they did not believe me. It shows what I have often said, that true immersion in the Way brings instinctive perception of the outer world.” Manners began to speak, but she interrupted him. “I should like to offer you some tea, but—” She let the sentence trail away. Jones, who was thirsty, wondered what the ultimate clause would have been.

“Who is Percy?”

“Doctor Kronfelder. Those who have known him a long time call him Percy.” She waved a hand limply. “We have been here fourteen years. We had been drifting through life, Charles and I, without purpose. Do you have a purpose in life?”

“Catching criminals. Tell me how you came here,” Manners said hastily, as Mrs Gresham seemed about to reflect on his occupation.

“Our time came when a surgeon, three surgeons, three of the leading surgeons in London, said that I must have an operation. I will not embarrass you with details, but it was a very delicate internal operation.” She looked at Manners and then at Jones, who found himself staring at the worn carpet. “At that time Charles had this job with, I don’t know, an export firm – oh, quite a good job, Superintendent. We lived in Highgate, a very pleasant house, everything quite comfortable, we were like any other people you meet in the street, you would have seen no difference. But there was a difference.
I knew that I was not
meant to
be cut by surgeons
, do you understand me? I was not aware of it at the time, but I was seeking for the Way.”

The stuff I listen to in the cause of justice, Manners thought. Aloud he said, “Sylvia was with you?”

“We took her to a meeting. Percy did not often hold public meetings even then, and now he has given them up, but something drew us to that one. He talked of the Way of Peace, and while I listened—” A little shiver ran through Mrs Gresham’s large frame. “—I cannot express my feelings. But I knew. I understood – oh, not intellectually, don’t think that, Charles is the clever one – but through all my senses I knew what Percy calls the Isness of Becoming. I asked Percy’s advice – he is also a doctor, you know that – and he told me that the operation was quite unnecessary. He treated me, not through medicine but through talk, prayer, meditation, and within two weeks the very distressing symptoms of my illness had vanished. We had found more than the Way of Peace, we had found Supra Peace.”

“Your husband too?”

“He Understands but he has not Become,” Mrs Gresham replied cryptically. “It is a saying of Percy’s.”

The interview, Manners saw, was likely to be a long one. He persevered, trying to extract from Melicent Gresham’s tangled web of mysticism the thread that would lead to her daughter. The conversion, he gathered, had been complete. Charles Gresham had given up his job and they had come to live at the Home of Supra Peace. The principles of the Home were that all labour was voluntary and that those who volunteered received payment according to their needs. For those who lived in the Home, however, the needs were few. One of the great blessings of the Way of Supra Peace, as Melicent Gresham observed, was its absolute freedom from all monetary encumbrances, and Manners gathered that all such encumbrances in the form of house and savings had passed to the Home. Sylvia had gone to a local school, and had lived at the Home. Some twenty families lived there, the number fluctuating as new disciples were gathered and old ones strayed away.

But there had always been something alien about Sylvia, her mother said. The Isness of Becoming was something that she never apprehended, and the simple life and food of the Home seemed insufficient for her. She began to show an interest in boys. There was one other boy of her age at the Home, and when she was fourteen she had been found at night in his bedroom – or so Manners gathered, for Mrs Gresham spoke of’ the incident so circuitously, and with such a number of tangential observations on Sylvia’s incapacity to understand the Way, that he could not be sure. After that there had been an incident with a married man, a man who had left the Home abruptly. And after that Percy himself had been tempted, and – here Melicent Gresham used language of such mystical obscurity that Jones looked totally bewildered. But it had been decided that Sylvia should go.

“Go where?”

“Away.” She made one of her limp hand movements.

“She belonged in the world of cinemas and theatres and – sex. The Way of Peace was not for her.”

Jones felt that he should say something. “You sent her to a relative?”

“We have no relatives.” She amplified this. “We do not acknowledge them.”

“But then—”

“She belonged in the world. We had taken her from it, but she wished to return. We did not prevent her. Percy found her a job.”

“What sort of job?”

“Something, I don’t know, it was in some kind of shop, a department store I believe. He also arranged for her to stay with a very suitable family, one that attended our meetings sometimes although they were not residents. But she did not stay more than a week or two with them, she did not stay in the job Percy had found.” She made another of those indecisive gestures. “She belonged to the world, she returned to it, it destroyed her.”

Manners could hardly trust himself to speak. Indignation rose in his chest, strong as heartburn. “She was your daughter.”

She bent her direct yet absent gaze upon him. “Here we regard earthly relationships differently.”

“You owed her something.” She merely looked at him. “You did nothing – nothing at all to see whether she was happy, looked after?”

“She had rejected us. She had rejected the Way of Peace. She had rejected this Home.”

Home, Manners wanted to say, do you call this mausoleum for decaying cranks a home? But there was no point in saying it. “Did she ever come back?”

“At first she came here sometimes to see us, three or four times a year perhaps. She said she was a model, then an actress, that she had good parts. Whether it was true or not—” She got up, wandered to the window, touching bits of furniture, “—I don’t know. It all seemed to us very trivial.”

“Your husband shared your opinions?”

“Of course.”

“Had you seen her or heard from her in the last few months?”

“Oh, certainly we had letters. And a card at Christmas. But I have not kept them. They would tell you nothing, they were – trivial.”

Jones coughed, leaned forward on the bed. “Can you suggest anybody who might have had a reason for killing her?”

She bent her gaze upon him, stared at him rather as though he were an insect. “It was one of her lovers,” she said placidly. “How was she when you found her, had she been – attacked?”

“She was strangled,” Manners said shortly. “There was no sign of sexual interference.” They got up to go.

The elderly man’s idle mopping had carried him to the head of the staircase where he stood, hand on mop head, staring at one of John Martin’s monumental religious scenes. “She told you what you wanted?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Did you know Sylvia Gresham?”

He cackled. “I’m her father.”

From the dismissive way in which Melicent Gresham had spoken, Manners had thought her husband was dead. Now he said, “You agreed when Sylvia left this place?”

“Not much use doing anything else. When Melly makes up her mind to something, that’s what happens.”

“But you were her father. You were responsible.”

“I came here for peace. That’s what I’ve got.” He lifted the mop, touched the end of it, grinned.

“Did you hear from her?”

“Heard from her all right. Letters are trouble. Never answered.”

“What did she say?”

“Can’t remember. Some stuff. Always asking me about things.” He turned bleary eyes to Manners. “You’re as bad as she was, don’t seem to understand. I just want to be left alone, that’s all. Let them run everything, Percy, Melicent. Just leave me alone.” He looked at the painting, in which hundreds of tiny figures cowered under an enormous rock which was being split by lightning. Some vast heavenly presence filled the sky.

“That’s a fine picture. I like looking at it.”

Manners’s heels positively clattered as he went down the stairs, he went so fast across the hall and out to the car that Jones could hardly keep up with him. In the car, as they drove back, he spoke with a bitterness the sergeant had never heard in his voice. “The poor little devil, slung out to look after herself before she was sixteen. With a mother and father like that, what chance had she got? It would have been a blessing for her if she’d been brought up in a slum.”

Some of the Witnesses

When Manners returned to the Yard he found Ryan waiting for him. The inspector had the glint of achievement in his eye as he told of his conversations with Kabanga and Susan Strong. Manners was unimpressed, and said so.

“That’s not the end of it. Kabanga lives in Surrey, in a place called The Dell, sort of a high-class housing estate, only they don’t call ’em that out there. She stayed there with him once or twice. Right? Now, a chap called—” Ryan looked at a memo pad, “—Paget has been on the blower to say that he remembers seeing this girl at a party there last Friday. She was with Kabanga, called herself Sylvia, he doesn’t know her other name—”

“Sylvia Gresham. Estelle Simpson was her stage name or whatever you like to call it.”

“Gresham, all right. At this party the girl had some sort of row with a man named Grundy. Paget says she smacked his face.”

“Yes. I still don’t see any cause for excitement.”

“Wait. We’re not at the end yet. You know Jones left someone checking up on that idea of his about the strip cartoon. Here’s the result.”

Manners took the memorandum Ryan handed to him, read:

Subject.
Guffy McTuffie strip cartoon. This appears six days a week in
Daily Blade,
has done so for three years. Have talked to editor, Mr Clacton, who says it was recently decided to rest the series. Decision was communicated yesterday to T Werner and S Grundy, who are jointly responsible for it.

T Werner and S Grundy are partners in AdArts, firm of advertising art agents, also produce Guffy cartoons. Understand Grundy has ideas, Werner is artist, but need to check. Suggest investigation both men, see if associates of Estelle Simpson.

Manners read and re-read it. “Grundy was at the party.”

“Right. And the girl smacked his face. And he lives in The Dell. A visit is called for, don’t you think? Here are two things that could have happened. One, Kabanga killed her because he found out she was having an affair with Grundy. His club is only ten minutes’ walk away from her flat, it’s perfectly possible. Two, and I like this better, she was a tom. Grundy is an old client and when she meets him she tries to put the black on him, that’s what causes the trouble at the party. She increases the pressure, threatens to tell his wife, he kills her.” Manners smiled faintly, said nothing. “I know, theorising without facts. Still, it’s worth seeing Grundy and this Paget, who sounds a nasty bit of work by the way.”

“Yes, you’re right.” He was still thinking of Sylvia Gresham’s parents, and the Home of Supra Peace.

“Whose manor is it?”

“Bobby Clavering’s.”

Five minutes later Manners was talking to Superintendent Robert Clavering, chief of the CID in the district where The Dell was to be found. The call was made partly as a matter of courtesy, partly in the hope of obtaining information. Clavering, a big bluff man who kept his nose to the ground, had little to give. The Dell, Manners gathered, was an estate similar to several that were being built on the outskirts of London and other big cities.

“They knock down perfectly good old places, put up these damned glasshouses, people go and live in ’em because it’s fashionable, pay the earth for three poky rooms, all mod cons of course, landscaped gardens, all that. The Dell’s one of those. Don’t know how some of the people afford to live there, I know I couldn’t. Wouldn’t want to for that matter, I like a garden of my own.”

Manners was not interested in where Clavering lived or wanted to live. He asked about Paget and Grundy. “Edgar H Paget, F.A.L.P.A., yes, I know him.” Clavering’s jolly laugh boomed down the telephone. “Estate agent, does very nicely I should think. Biggest busybody in the district, always writing to the local paper about civic rights, ringing up the Council about refuse collection, that sort of man. What’s our Edgar been doing?”

“Nothing he shouldn’t, as far as I know. He rang us with a bit of information about that job in Cridge Mews. Just wondered what his standing was.”

“Solid citizen, very much so. What was the other chap’s name, Grundy? Don’t know him at all. You coming down here?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Come in and have a noggin.”

Manners promised to do so, rang off, looked at his watch, and sighed. He ate a hurried meal, collected the sergeant who had been gathering the material in the memo, a man with the improbable name of Fastness, made sure that Paget was in, and set out on the half-hour car journey to see him and perhaps to pay a call also on Grundy.

“Mind you, Superintendent, I’m saying nothing, I’m making no accusation. Just giving you the evidence of my own eyes.” Edgar Paget flung himself back in his chair, a man exhausted by the performance of his duty.

“And what you saw with your own eyes was Miss Gresham coming down the stairs—”

“He’d torn her dress.”

“Her dress was torn,” Manners said patiently. “You didn’t see him tearing it. And Mr Grundy was at the top of the stairs, dabbing at his cheek.”

Paget bristled a little, evidently feeling that these refinements were unnecessary. Manners turned to Jennifer Paget, large, spotty, awkward, and considered her for a moment. Then he spoke gently. “Now, Miss Paget, I’ll just recapitulate what you’ve said. You were in the lavatory upstairs, and you heard a scream. You opened the door and you saw Miss Gresham standing in the doorway. Mr Grundy was behind her. His hand was on her shoulder, and he was trying to detain her.” Manners noticed a glance, a mere flicker of a glance from upraised and then downcast eyes, directed by the rock-faced Mrs Paget at her daughter.

“You’re sure of that?”

Jennifer had increased in assurance with the length of his stay. She spoke boldly.

“Quite sure.”

“Was her dress already torn?”

“Yes. She was holding it up with her other hand, her right hand.”

“Then she broke away from him and came down the stairs? Mr Grundy followed her?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you do?” Manners asked suddenly.

Two spots of colour showed in her pudgy cheeks. “I was frightened. I went back into the toilet.”

“Would Mr Grundy have seen you?”

“I – I don’t know. I just stepped back. He might not have done.”

“And now just tell me again what you saw on the following night, Saturday night.”

She told them with composure, in a slightly sing-song voice. “It was about – between half past ten and eleven, and I was taking Puggy, that’s our dog, out for a walk. We went up Brambly Way and to The Dell and at the entrance to The Dell Puggy tugged me that way and I let him pull me along. Just a few yards inside the entrance I saw Mr Grundy and the lady I’d seen at the party. They were standing off the path and he was holding her and saying something, but I couldn’t hear what. Then Puggy pulled me back into Brambly Way again, but I looked back and they were going together into No. 99, that’s where Mr Kabanga lives. That’s all I saw.”

Was the girl telling the truth? Manners was not sure. But Fastness wrote out the statements and they signed them, Paget with a flourish, his daughter in a round girlish hand.

“A drop more whisky?” Manners shook his head.

“You understand, I’m just doing my duty as a citizen. And my daughter too.”

“I understand.”

Marion’s attempts to preserve an integrated relationship with her husband took three forms, cooking a meal with particular care, talking about something that she thought would interest him, and making it clear that she was sexually available. When one or all of these stratagems failed she was inclined to relapse into her more frequent feeling that such things were unimportant. Tuesday evening was a relapsed period. They had frozen fishcakes and frozen peas for dinner, with sauce made from a packet, and afterwards cheese and fruit.

Grundy had said little, but now he paused in the act of coring an apple, tapped the evening paper. “That girl’s been killed.”

“What girl?”

“The one whose dress tore at the party.”

“Well.” Marion took the paper from him, read the story. “It says here her name’s Estelle Simpson, but it does look like the same girl. You can see what sort of girl she was.” She got up, cleared away the plates, spoke from the kitchen. “That incident’s closed, agreed?”

“There wasn’t any incident.”

She came to the door of the kitchen, dishcloth in hand, and spoke with elaborate patience. “I don’t want to know anything more about your relationship with her, do you understand?”

“There’s nothing to know.”

Her patience now barely masked an irritation that she felt as acutely as if it were flannel chafing her skin. “Don’t try to treat me like a child, as though I didn’t understand. I fully realise that at certain times—”

He broke in. “You don’t realise any bloody thing at all, so shut up.”

Was it worth making a retort on this low level? She was still trying to decide when the door bell rang and provided a reason for ending the conversation.

“Mrs Grundy?” said one of the two men at the door.

“Good evening. Is your husband in?”

She had begun to say a hesitant yes, when she was aware of her husband’s voice behind her. “I’m Grundy. What do you want?”

Almost but not quite smiling, and moving forward without in the least seeming to push his way in, the man in front said, “Detective-Superintendent Manners, sir, and this is Sergeant Fastness. Is it a convenient time to have a word with you?”

Somehow, after a moment or two, they were both inside, and she found herself closing the door after them. They all sat down in the living-room. The superintendent, she saw, was a refined, almost ascetic-looking man, one who might well have been a member of the district’s Art or Archeological or Musical Societies. The sergeant was, well, he was very much like what you would expect a sergeant to be. Now the superintendent was saying, after glancing quickly at the evening paper on the table, “I wonder if you noticed the story in the paper this evening?”

“About that woman, Estelle Simpson, you mean?”

Grundy said. “We were just talking about it as a matter of fact, speculating whether she was someone we’d met—”

“Last Friday night, here at a party?” Manners nodded. “Yes, she was.”

“She didn’t use the same name there.”

“No. Sylvia Gresham was her real name.” He looked from Grundy to Marion, nodding again, pleased as Punch. His pleasure did not diminish when he was offered a drink. The four of them sat sipping whisky. Then Manners continued, still with an air of finding his own questions slightly absurd.

“Did either of you know Miss Gresham – I mean, before the party.” Their negatives came together. “But I believe, sir, that you had something of an argument with her there.”

“No.” Grundy added, in a tone of vicious sarcasm.

“Is it your idea that because of this supposed argument I killed her? Is that what you’ve come to ask?”

Manners looked, and indeed was, shocked. People didn’t, shouldn’t, say such things with such crudity. Why had this big bruiser-like ginger man said it? He felt a certain artificiality in the words, as though Grundy were trying to force an issue that had not been reached. He said placatively, “Certainly not, sir. We’re making inquiries into Miss Gresham’s death and this incident has been reported to us, that’s all.”

“And I can guess who’s reported it.”

“Would you care to tell us just what happened, sir?”

“Nothing to tell. I was upstairs, tried to go to the lavatory but someone was in there, and she called to me from the bedroom. The zip on her dress had got caught in the dressing-table curtain. She asked me to do it up, I tugged it, tore her dress. She swore at me, screamed, scratched my face. Then she ran downstairs.”

“I see.”

“That’s all. Never seen her before, never seen her since.”

“Did you see anyone come out of the lavatory after you left it?”

“No.”

“Or standing in or beside the lavatory door when you came downstairs after Miss Gresham?”

“No.”

Manners said carefully, “There is a witness who said that you put your hand on Miss Gresham’s shoulder, tried to detain her.”

“I didn’t see this witness, but that’s right. I did put my hand on her shoulder. I was pretty annoyed when she scratched my face. Forgot to mention it.”

Manners had now to make up his mind whether he should mention the identification made by Jennifer on Saturday night, and the postcard found in Cridge Mews. Such decisions are taken almost intuitively, and he could not afterwards have said why he mentioned the second of these but not the first. He took a photostat of the card from an envelope and asked Grundy whether he had written it.

The photostat lay on a small occasional table. The big man bent over to look at it. His wife got up from her chair and came over to look at it too. Then, lips pursed, she went back to her chair.

Grundy shook his head. “Nothing to do with me.”

“That little figure on the bottom. It’s been suggested that it looks very much like your cartoon character.” Manners paused, then pronounced the words with an effort. “Guffy McTuffie.”

“So I see. But that doesn’t mean I drew it, or wrote the card.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m telling you I didn’t. I take it the card has something to do with the murder.”

“It was found in her flat. The appointment made in it is for Monday evening, last night, the night she was murdered. We’d like to know who wrote it.”

“I can tell you I didn’t, although as a matter of fact it looks rather like my writing.” He went to a desk, took out two sheets of paper which had some notes on them, and handed them to Manners. The writing certainly looked very similar to that on the postcard. My word, he thought, this is a cool customer. Let’s see how cool he is. He said. “I wonder if you’d mind writing something for me.”

“All right.”

He dictated the words on the postcard. The big man wrote them, unmoved.

“By the way, sir, where were you yesterday evening after – oh, after eight o’clock say?”

Grundy’s smile was grim. “At my office working on this strip cartoon series. Alone. I got home about a quarter to twelve.”