The Mudflats of the Dead

but perhaps you can make some suggestions.’

Miranda, it transpired, had received a photo copy of Lost Parenthesis by post, together with a request that she would keep it safely and return it if Palgrave asked for it back. She said she had begun to read it when it arrived, thought the early chapters were pretentious and not very interesting and that she had then turned to the last couple of pages and promised herself a full study of the book later on, as Palgrave seemed in no hurry to have her copy back. Asked if she knew where any other copies were likely to have gone, she suggested that one might have been lent to the Lowsons.

‘We met them on holiday. Colin was once engaged to Morag,’ Miranda said, and gave the sergeant the Lowsons’ new address to which they had moved when they left London soon after the Saltacres holiday.

‘Right up there?’ said Pinhurst, when he heard where they were living. ‘Oh, well, that puts them right off the map so far as our enquiry is concerned. I’ll tell you what, though. We’ve got his own carbon copy among his other stuff. I’m going to plough through it again and then you can have a go. You’ll understand why when I tell you about my interviews with Peterheads and Kent and Weald.’

The offices of Peterhead and Peterhead were in a turning off the Strand, and Pinhurst had gone to them before he tackled Kent and Weald. The agents were father and son and it was the younger partner who was interviewed.

He produced the top copy which Palgrave had sent them and also the letter which had accompanied the typescript. In it Palgrave stated that the book had taken longer to write than he had anticipated, but that here it was at last. There was also a copy of the letter they had sent back to him, promising to read the book, to which they had been looking forward, and to let him have their opinion of it if, for any reason (‘as it is only your second novel’) they thought it unsuitable for offer to Kent and Weald.

Then there was another letter:

‘Please do not proceed with Lost Parenthesis until you hear from me again. Checking the carbon copy, I have come to the conclusion that my description of some of the chief characters may be libellous.’

Pinhurst was intrigued and asked whether, in the agent’s opinion, there was any substance in Palgrave’s fears. He was assured that in the opinion of the agents there was, on the surface, no substance in them at all, unless the author had had some specific persons in mind and, even so, it was very doubtful indeed whether any of the statements in the book were actionable.

‘After we had written to him in answer to his letter when he sent us the book, we got his second letter asking us not to send the work to Kent and Weald. We tried to telephone him, but he was at school during our office hours, so we wrote another letter. I suppose that, by the time it was delivered, he was dead. We don’t know what to do about the book now. We are not prepared to ignore what must be regarded as the author’s last wishes, so we are holding on to the script in case he left any posthumous papers which can solve our problem. Possibly his next- of-kin may give us permission to go ahead with the book.’ The prospective publishers had even less to say. They had been rung up by Peterheads with the information that the author wanted to withdraw his book and had been surprised and rather regretful. They had lost money (‘as we expect to do on a first book, Detective-Inspector’) but they thought Mr Palgrave had talent. They had been given the title of his second book and a short synopsis of the plot, both sent in earlier by the author.

‘No sense in pursuing any more of these sidelines,’ said Pinhurst, ‘until we’ve found out where he went after he left the school on that Friday afternoon. I detest these chase-ups. Just a lot of dead ends to follow and dead wood to get rid of and, ten to one, no dice in the end. Oh, well, let’s get back to the landlady and that old nosey parker next door, and then we’ll have another go at your Mrs Kirby. I think she is our best bet, because if there is a tie-up between the death of the St John girl and Palgrave being given a lethal dose of arsenic, well, she’s the only person, apart from her husband, who seems to have known both parties.’

‘There are also the Lowsons, sir.’

‘Yes, if they still lived in London, but Mrs Kirby gave you a Lancashire address.’

‘People don’t always stay put in their homes, sir.’

‘Oh, well, if we get nothing in these parts, we must have a go at the Lowsons. Didn’t Mrs Kirby tell you that Lowson is a doctor, though? Doctors don’t gallivant all over the place when they’ve got their own practice. Palgrave was poisoned in London, not in Lancashire.’

‘Cherchez la femme, sir? And, according to Mrs Kirby, Dr Lowson sold his practice after he lost his father, and is engaged in research.’

CHAPTER 17

A DEAD MAN SPEAKS

‘My fancies, fly before ye;

Be ye my fiction – but her story.’

Richard Crashaw

« ^ »

Dame Beatrice read her photocopy of Lost Parenthesis with more concentrated attention than she usually accorded to works of fiction; in fact, by the time she began the third chapter she was inclined to think that here was part of an autobiography rather than a slightly over-written piece of purely imaginative prose.

This impression was heightened by the fact that the narrative was told in the first person singular and that the writer, somewhat irritatingly, took himself very seriously indeed.

Not risking a disclosure of his true profession, Palgrave had described himself as a young interne and, although parts of the story appeared to have been plagiarised (whether the author realised it or not) from other and better writers, there was no doubt that he had done his homework by consulting non-fictional works on medicine, the law and morbid psychology.

The theme of the book was blackmail. The hero had found himself involved with a woman patient described as a few years older than himself. He had yielded to her charms to the extent of providing her with a baby whom, at her instigation, he had subsequently murdered.

On the strength of this (Dame Beatrice thought) unlikely episode, since to procure an abortion for the woman in these conscienceless days would have been a simpler and far less dangerous proposition that the calculated infanticide of a being already delivered from the womb, the mother black-mailed the young medico, bleeding him so mercilessly that he had seen fit to drown her.

This had happened on holiday and here the author had taken further risks. Under fabricated names, Saltacres and Stack Ferry were well, although over elaborately, described, and the characters, to anybody who knew the originals, were all too plainly not only Palgrave himself, but his acquaintances, including Miranda, Adrian, Morag and the dead Camilla.

The latter, indeed, appeared in several roles, or so it seemed to the percipient reader. She was both the predatory blackmailer and the hoydenish teenager. She also appeared to be a kind of Siamese twin of the apparently idolised (by the author) heroine, whom the first-person hero ended by marrying.

Incidents which Dame Beatrice knew of only by hearsay, such as the misappropriated car, the moonlight bathes, the bohemian set-up at the Saltacres cottage and the coincidental arrival at the cottage of Morag and Cupar Lowson (here renamed Nancy and Shaun McBride) would mean little, she thought, to readers who had never taken a peep behind the scenes, but might act like dynamite on anybody who had the facts which lay behind the incidents described in the book.

On the other hand, the descriptions of the various characters and the actions and motives attributed to each were so mixed and mingled and, in the reader’s view, often so impulsive and contradictory, that it was unlikely that any one person would have been able to identify herself or himself as a personage portrayed in the book.

‘No truth, no libel, I imagine,’ said Dame Beatrice, handing the script to Laura. ‘See what you make of it. Knowing as much as I do, and a good deal more which I surmise, I do not feel that I have brought an open mind to my perusal of this work. You, I trust, will do better.’

‘Doubtful,’ said Laura. ‘By this time I expect you’ve told me much of what you’ve found out, and you know