Unnatural Causes (19 page)

“His wife had money … Did he talk to anyone else about his plan do you know, Max?”

“Well, he said not. He was rather like a schoolboy about it. Tremendous swearings to secrecy and I had to promise I wouldn’t even telephone him about it. But you see my problem. Do I, or do I not, hand this over to the police?”

“Of course. To Inspector Reckless of the Suffolk CID, to be precise. I’ll give you his address. And you’d better phone him to say it’s on the way.”

“I thought you’d say that. It’s obvious, I suppose. But one has these irrational inhibitions. I know nothing of his present heir. But I imagine that this letter gives someone a whacking great motive.”

“The best. But we’ve no evidence that his heir knew. And, if it’s any comfort to you, the man with the strongest financial
motive also has the strongest alibi. He was in police custody when Maurice Seton died.”

“That was clever of him … I suppose I couldn’t just hand this letter over to you, Adam?”

“I’m sorry, Max. I’d rather not.”

Gurney sighed, replaced the letter in his wallet and gave his attention to the meal. They did not talk again of Seton until lunch was over and Max was enveloping himself in the immense black cloak which he invariably wore between October and May, and which gave him the appearance of an amateur conjuror who had seen better days.

“I shall be late for our Board meeting if I don’t hurry. We have become very formal, Adam, very efficient. Nothing is decided except by resolution of the whole Board. It’s the effect of our new buildings. In the old days we sat closeted in our dusty cells and made our own decisions. It led to a certain ambiguity about the firm’s policy but I’m not sure that was such a bad thing … Can I drop you anywhere? Who are you off to investigate next?”

“I’ll walk, thank you, Max. I’m going to Soho to have a chat with a murderer.”

Max paused, surprised. “Not Seton’s murderer? I thought you and the Suffolk CID were baffled. D’you mean I’ve been wrestling with my conscience for nothing?”

“No, this murderer didn’t kill Seton although I don’t suppose he would have had any moral objections. Certainly someone is hoping to persuade the police that he’s implicated. It’s L. J. Luker. Remember him?”

“Didn’t he shoot his business partner in the middle of Piccadilly and get away with it? It was in 1959, wasn’t it?”

“That’s the man. The Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the verdict on grounds of misdirection. Mr. Justice Brothwick,
through some extraordinary aberration, suggested to the jury that a man who made no reply when charged probably had something to hide. He must have realised the consequences as soon as the words were out of his mouth. But they were said. And Luker went free, just as he said he would.”

“And how does he tie up with Maurice Seton? I can’t imagine two men with less in common.”

“That,” said Dalgliesh, “is what I’m hoping to find out.”

Dalgliesh walked through Soho to the Cortez Club. With his mind still freshened by the clean emptiness of Suffolk he found these canyoned streets, even in their afternoon doldrums, more than usually depressing. It was difficult to believe that he had once enjoyed walking through this shoddy gulch. Now even a month’s absence made the return less tolerable. It was largely a matter of mood, no doubt, for the district is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life; one of the best shopping centres for food in London; the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can’t make up their minds. Passing the strip clubs, the grubby basement stairs, the silhouettes of bored girls against the upstairs window blinds, Dalgliesh thought that a daily walk through these ugly streets could drive any man into a monastery, less from sexual disgust than from an intolerable ennui with the sameness, the joylessness of lust.

The Cortez Club was no better and no worse than its neighbours. There were the usual photographs outside and the inevitable group of middle-aged, depressed-looking men eyeing them with a furtive lack of interest. The place wasn’t yet open but the door yielded to his push. There was no one in the small reception kiosk. He went down the narrow stairs with their scruffy red carpet and drew aside the curtain of beads which divided the restaurant from the passage.

It was much as he remembered it. The Cortez Club, like its owner, had an innate capacity for survival. It looked a little smarter although the afternoon light showed up the tawdriness of the pseudo-Spanish decorations and the grubbiness of the walls. The floor was cluttered with tables, many only large enough for one and all too closely packed for comfort. But then, the customers did not come to the Cortez Club for family dinner parties, nor were they primarily interested in the food.

At the far end of the restaurant there was a small stage furnished with only a single chair and a large cane screen. To the left of the stage was an upright piano, its top littered with manuscript paper. A thin young man in slacks and sweater was curved against the instrument picking out a tune with his left hand and jotting it down with his right. Despite the sprawling attitude, the air of casual boredom, he was completely absorbed. He glanced up briefly as Dalgliesh came in but returned immediately to his monotonous stabbing at the keys.

The only other person present was a West African who was pushing a broom in leisurely fashion around the floor. He said in a soft, low voice: “We’re not open yet, Sir. Service doesn’t begin until six-thirty.”

“I don’t want to be served, thank you. Is Mr. Luker in?”

“I’ll have to enquire, Sir.”

“Please do so. And I’d like to see Miss Coombs too.”

“I’ll have to enquire, Sir. I’m not sure that she’s here.”

“Oh, I think you’ll find that she’s here. Tell her please that Adam Dalgliesh would like to speak to her.”

The man disappeared. The pianist continued his improvisation without looking up, and Dalgliesh settled himself at the table just inside the door to pass the ten minutes which he judged Luker would feel it appropriate to keep him waiting. He spent the time thinking of the man upstairs.

Luker had said he would kill his partner and he had killed. He had said he wouldn’t hang for it and he didn’t hang. Since he could hardly have counted on Mr. Justice Brothwick’s co-operation, the prediction had shown either uncommon prescience or remarkable confidence in his own luck. Some of the stories which had grown around him since his trial were no doubt apocryphal but he was not the man to repudiate them. He was known and accepted by the professional criminal classes without being one of them. They gave him the reverent half-superstitious respect of men who know exactly how much it is reasonable to risk for one who in one irretrievable stride has stepped outside all the limits. There was an ambience of awe about any man who had come so close to that last dreadful walk. Dalgliesh was sometimes irritated to find that even the police weren’t immune to it. They found it hard to believe that Luker, who had killed so casually to satisfy a private grudge, could content himself with running a string of second-class nightclubs. Some more spectacular wickedness was expected of him than the manipulation of licensing laws or income tax returns and the selling of mildly erotic entertainment to his dreary expense account customers. But if he had other enterprises, nothing as yet was known of them. Perhaps there was nothing to know. Perhaps all he craved was this prosperous semi-respectability, the
spurious reputation, the freedom of this no man’s land between two worlds.

It was exactly ten minutes before the coloured man returned to say that Luker would see him. Dalgliesh made his own way up the two flights to the large front room from which Luker chose to direct not only the Cortez but all his clubs. It was warm and airless, over-furnished and under-ventilated. There was a desk in the middle of the room, a couple of filing cabinets against one wall, an immense safe to the left of the gas fire and a sofa and three easy chairs grouped around a television set. In the corner was a small washstand basin. The room was obviously designed to serve both as an office and a sitting room and succeeded in being neither. There were three people present: Luker himself; Sid Martelli, his general factotum at the Cortez; and Lily Coombs. Sid, in his shirt sleeves, was heating himself a small saucepan of milk on a gas ring at the side of the fire. He was wearing his usual expression of resigned misery. Miss Coombs, already in her evening black, was squatting on a pouffe in front of the gas fire varnishing her nails. She raised a hand in salute and gave Dalgliesh a wide, unworried smile. Dalgliesh thought that the manuscript description of her, whomever had written it, fitted her well enough. He couldn’t personally detect the Russian aristocratic blood but this hardly surprised him since he knew perfectly well that Lil had been bred no farther east than the Whitechapel Road. She was a large, healthy-looking blonde with strong teeth and the thick, rather pale skin which stands up well to ageing. She might be in her early forties. It was difficult to tell. She looked exactly as she had when Dalgliesh had first seen her five years earlier. Probably she would look much the same for another five years.

Luker had put on weight since their last meeting. The expensive suit was strained across his shoulders, his neck
bulged over the immaculate collar. He had a strong, unpleasant face, the skin so clear and shining that it might have been polished. His eyes were extraordinary. The irises were set exactly in the centre of the whites like small grey pebbles and were so lifeless that they gave the whole face a look of deformity. His hair, strong and black, came down low to a widow’s peak imposing an incongruous touch of femininity to his face. It was cut short all over and shone like dog’s hair, glossy and coarse. He looked like he was. But when he spoke his voice betrayed his origins. It was all there: the small town vicarage, the carefully fostered gentility, the minor public school. He had been able to change much. But he had not been able to alter his voice.

“Ah, Superintendent Dalgliesh. This is very pleasant. I’m afraid we’re booked out this evening but Michael may be able to find you a table. You’re interested in the floor show no doubt.”

“Neither dinner nor the show, thank you. Your food seemed to disagree with the last of my acquaintances who dined here. And I like my women to look like women, not nursing hippopotami. The photographs outside were enough. Where on earth do you pick them up?”

“We don’t. The dear girls recognise that they have, shall we say, natural advantages and come to us. And you mustn’t be censorious, Superintendent. We all have our private sexual fantasies. Just because yours aren’t catered for here doesn’t mean that you don’t enjoy them. Isn’t there a little saying about motes and beams? Remember, I’m a parson’s son as well as you. It seems to have taken us rather differently, though.” He paused as if for a moment interested in their separate reactions, then went on lightly: “The Superintendent and I have a common misfortune, Sid. We both had a parson for a dad. It’s an unhappy start for a boy. If they’re sincere you
despise them as a fool; if they’re not you write them off as a hypocrite. Either way, they can’t win.”

Sid, who had been sired by a Cypriot bartender on a mentally subnormal skivvy, nodded in passionate agreement.

Dalgliesh said: “I wanted a word with you and Miss Coombs about Maurice Seton. It isn’t my case so you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. But you know that, of course.”

“That’s right. I don’t have to say a damn word. But then I might be in a helpful, accommodating mood. You can never tell. Try me.”

“You know Digby Seton, don’t you?”

Dalgliesh could have sworn that the question was unexpected. Luker’s dead eyes flickered. He said: “Digby worked here for a few months last year when I lost my pianist. That was after his club failed. I lent him a bit to try and see him over but it was no go. Digby hasn’t quite got what it takes. But he’s not a bad pianist.”

“When was he here last?”

Luker spread his hands and turned to his companions: “He did a week for us in May, didn’t he, when Ricki Carlis took his overdose? We haven’t seen him since.”

Lil said: “He’s been in once or twice, L. J. Not when you were here though.” Luker’s staff always called him by his initials. Dalgliesh wasn’t sure whether the idea was to emphasise the general cosiness of their relationship with him or to make Luker feel like an American tycoon. Lil went on helpfully, “Wasn’t he in with a party in the summer, Sid?”

Sid assumed an expression of lugubrious thought. “Not summer, Lil. More like late spring. Didn’t he come in with Mavis Manning and her crowd after her show folded up in May?”

“That was Ricki, Sid. You’re thinking of Ricki. Digby Seton was never with Mavis.”

They were as well drilled, thought Dalgliesh, as a song-and-dance act.

Luker smiled smoothly: “Why pick on Digby? This isn’t murder and, if it was, Digby’s safe enough. Look at the facts. Digby had a rich brother. Nice for both of them. The brother had a dicky heart which might give out on him any minute. Hard luck on him but again, nice for Digby. And one day it does give out. That’s natural causes, Superintendent, if the expression means anything at all. Admittedly someone drove the body down to Suffolk and pushed it out to sea. And did some rather messy and unpleasant things to it first, I hear. It looks to me as if poor Mr. Seton was rather unpopular with some of his literary neighbours. I’m surprised, Superintendent, that your aunt cares to live among these people, let alone leaving her chopper handy for the dead.”

“You seem well informed,” said Dalgliesh. He was remarkably quickly informed too. Dalgliesh wondered who had been keeping him so clearly in the picture.

Luker shrugged. “There’s nothing illegal in that. My friends tell me things. They know I’m interested in them.”

“Particularly when they inherit £200,000?”

“Listen, Superintendent. If I want money I can make it, and make it legally. Any fool can make a fortune outside the law. It takes a clever man, these days, to make it legally. Digby Seton can pay me back the fifteen hundred I lent him when he was trying to save the Golden Pheasant if he likes. I’m not pressing him.”