The Skull Beneath the Skin (2 page)

A voice, quiet, masculine and authoritative, broke into her reverie.

“That name plate’s crooked.”

“I know.”

Cordelia opened her eyes. The voice was deceptive: he was older than she had expected, she guessed a little over sixty. Despite the heat of the day he was wearing a tweed jacket, well tailored but old with leather patches on the elbows. He wasn’t tall, perhaps no more than five feet ten inches, but he stood very upright with an easy, confident stance, almost an elegance, which she sensed concealed an inner wariness, as if he were tensed for a word of command. She wondered if he had once been a soldier. His head was held high and fixed, the gray and somewhat sparse hair brushed smoothly back from a high, creased forehead. The face was long and bony with a dominant nose jutting from cheeks reddened and crossed by broken veins, and a wide, well-shaped mouth. The eyes which scrutinized her (not, she felt, unbenignly) were keen under the
bushy eyebrows. The left brow was held higher than the right and she saw that he had a habit of twitching his brows and working the corners of the long mouth; it gave his face a restlessness which was singularly at variance with the stillness of his body and which made it slightly embarrassing for her to meet his eyes. He said: “Better get the job done properly.”

She watched without speaking while he put down the briefcase he was carrying, took from a pocket a pen and his wallet, found a card, and wrote on the back of it in an upright, rather schoolboyish hand.

Taking the card, Cordelia noted the single name, Morgan, and the telephone number, then turned it over. She read:

Sir George Ralston, Bt., D.S.O., M.C.

So she was right. He had been a soldier. She asked: “Will he be expensive, this Mr. Morgan?”

“Less expensive than making a nonsense. Tell him I gave you his number. He’ll charge what the job’s worth, no more.”

Cordelia’s heart lifted. The lopsided name plaque, gravely surveyed by the critical eye of this unexpected and eccentric knight errant, suddenly seemed to her irresistibly funny, no longer a calamity but a joke. Even Kingly Street was transformed with her mood and became a glittering, sunlit bazaar, pulsating with optimism and life. She almost laughed aloud. Controlling her trembling mouth she said gravely: “It’s very kind of you. Are you a connoisseur of name plates or just a public benefactor?”

“Some people think I’m a public menace. Actually, I’m a client, that is, if you’re Cordelia Gray. Don’t people ever tell you …”

Cordelia, unreasonably, was disappointed. Why should she have supposed that he was different from other male clients? She finished the sentence for him: “That it’s an unsuitable job for a woman? They do, and it isn’t.”

He said mildly: “I was going to say, don’t they ever tell you that your office is difficult to find? This street’s a mess. Half the buildings aren’t properly numbered. Too much change of use, I suppose. But the new plate should help when it’s properly fixed. Better get it done. Gives a poor impression.”

At that moment Bevis panted up beside them, his curls damp with exertion, the tell tale screwdriver protruding from his shirt pocket. Holding a richly purring Tomkins against one flushed cheek, he presented his charming delinquency to the newcomer. He was rewarded by a curt, “A botched job that,” and a look which instantly rejected him as officer material. Sir George turned to Cordelia: “Shall we go up then?”

Cordelia avoided Bevis’s eyes, which she guessed were rolling heavenward, and they climbed the narrow, linoleum-covered stairs in single file, Cordelia leading, past the single lavatory and washroom which served all the tenants in the building (she hoped that Sir George wouldn’t need to use it) and into the front outer office on the third floor. Miss Maudsley’s anxious eyes looked up at them over her typewriter. Bevis deposited Tomkins in his basket (where he at once began washing away the contamination of Kingly Street), gave Miss Maudsley a wide-eyed, admonitory look, and mouthed the word “client” at her. Miss Maudsley flushed, half rose from her chair, then subsided again and applied herself to painting out an error with a shaking hand. Cordelia led the way into her inner sanctum.

When they were seated she asked: “Would you like some coffee?”

“Real coffee or ersatz?”

“Well, I suppose you’d call it ersatz. But best quality ersatz.”

“Tea, then, if you have it, preferably Indian. Milk, please. No sugar. No biscuits.”

The form of the request was not meant to be offensive.
He was used to ascertaining the facts, then asking for what he wanted.

Cordelia put her head outside the door and said “Tea, please” to Miss Maudsley. The tea, when it arrived, would be served in the delicate Rockingham cups which Miss Maudsley had inherited from her mother and had lent to the Agency for the use of special clients only. She had no doubt that Sir George would qualify for the Rockingham.

They faced each other across Bernie’s desk. His eyes, gray and keen, inspected her face as if he were an examiner and she a candidate, which in a way she supposed she was. Their sudden, direct and glittering stare, in contrast to the spasmodically grimacing mouth, was disconcerting. He said: “Why do you call yourself Pryde’s?”

“Because the Agency was set up by an ex-Metropolitan policeman, Bernie Pryde. I worked for him for a time as his assistant and then he made me his partner. When he died he left the Agency to me.”

“How did he die?”

The question, sharp as an accusation, struck her as odd, but she answered calmly.

“He cut his wrists.”

She didn’t need to close her eyes to see again that remembered scene, garish and sharply outlined as a cinema still. Bernie had lain slumped in the chair in which she now sat, his half-clenched right hand close to the open cut-throat razor, his shrunken left hand, with its scored and gaping wrist, resting palm upwards in the bowl like some exotic sea anemone glimpsed in a rock pool, curling in death its pale and wrinkled tentacles. But no rock pool had ever been so brightly pink. She could smell again the sickly-sweet insistent odour of freshly spilt blood.

“Killed himself, did he?”

His tone lightened. He might have been a golfing partner congratulating Bernie on a well-placed putt, while his quick glance round the office suggested that the action had been in all the circumstances entirely reasonable.

She had no need to see either room through his eyes. What she saw through her own was depressing enough. She and Miss Maudsley had redecorated her office together, painting the walls pale yellow to give an impression of greater light and cleaning the faded carpet with a proprietary liquid; it had dried patchily so that the final impression reminded her of diseased skin. With its newly-washed curtains, the room at least looked clean and tidy, too tidy since the absence of clutter suggested no great pressure of work. Every surface was crammed with plants. Miss Maudsley had green fingers and the cuttings she had taken from her own plants and lovingly tended in a variety of oddly shaped receptacles picked up during her forays in the street markets had flourished despite the poor light. The resulting rampant greenery suggested that it had been cunningly deployed to conceal some sinister defect in the structure or décor. Cordelia still used Bernie’s old oak desk, could still imagine that she could trace the outline of the bowl in which he had bled away his life, could still identify one particular stain of spilt blood and water. But then there were so many rings, so many stains. His hat, with its upturned brim and grubby ribbon, still hung on the curved wooden coatstand. No jumble sale would take it and she found herself unable to throw it away. Twice she had taken it as far as the dustbin in the back yard but had been unable to drop it in, finding this final symbolic rejection of Bernie even more personal and traumatic than the exclusion of his name from the name plaque. If the Agency did finally fail—and she tried not
to think what the new rent would be when the lease came up for renewal in three years’ time—she supposed that she would still leave the hat hanging there in its pathetic decrepitude for unknown hands to toss with fastidious distaste into the wastepaper basket.

The tea arrived. Sir George waited until Miss Maudsley left. Then, measuring milk carefully into his cup, drop by drop, he said: “The job I’m offering is a mixture of functions. You’d be part bodyguard, part private secretary, part investigator and part—well, nursemaid. A bit of everything. Not everyone’s cup of tea. No knowing how it may turn out.”

“I’m supposed to be a private investigator.”

“No doubt. Shouldn’t be too purist in these times. A job’s a job. And you could find yourself involved in detection, even in violence, although it doesn’t seem likely. Unpleasant but not dangerous. If I thought there was any real risk to my wife or to you I wouldn’t be employing an amateur.”

Cordelia said: “Perhaps you could explain what, exactly, you want me to do.”

He frowned into his tea as if reluctant to begin. But when he did his account was lucid, concise and unhesitating.

“My wife is the actress Clarissa Lisle. You may have heard of her. Most people seem to know of her although she hasn’t worked much recently. I am her third husband and we married in June 1978. In July 1980 she was employed to play Lady Macbeth at the Duke of Clarence Theatre. On the third night of the advertised six-month run she received what she saw as a death threat. These threats have continued intermittently ever since.”

He began sipping his tea. Cordelia found herself gazing at him with the anxiety of a child hoping that her offering is acceptable. The pause seemed very long. She asked: “You said
that she
saw
the first note as threatening. Are you implying that its meaning was ambiguous? What form exactly do these threats take?”

“Typewritten notes. Variety of machines by the look of it. Each communication surmounted by a small drawing of a coffin or a skull. All are quotations from plays in which my wife has appeared. All the quotations deal with death or dying: the fear of death, the judgement of death, the inevitability of death.”

The reiteration of that numinous word was oppressive. But surely it was in her imagination that he twisted it on his lips with mordant satisfaction? She said: “But they don’t specifically threaten her?”

“She sees this harping on death as threatening. She’s sensitive. Actresses have to be I suppose. They need to be liked. This isn’t friendly. I have the notes here, the ones she kept. The first ones were thrown away. You’ll need the evidence.”

He unclicked the briefcase and took out a stout manilla envelope. From it he spilled a heap of small sheets of paper and began spreading them over the desk. She recognized the type of paper at once; it was a popular, medium-quality, white writing paper sold over thousands of stationery counters in three sizes with envelopes to match. The sender had been economical and had selected the smallest size. Each sheet bore a typed quotation surmounted by a small drawing about one inch high of either an up-ended coffin with the initials R.I.P. on the lid or a skull with two crossbones. Neither had required much skill; they were emblems rather than accurate representations. On the other hand, they were drawn with a certain sureness of line and decorative sense which suggested some facility with the pen or, in this case, with a black-tipped ballpoint. Under Sir George’s bony fingers the white slips of
paper with their stark black emblems shifted and rearranged themselves like the cards for some sinister game—hunt the quotation, murderer’s snap.

Most of the quotations were familiar, words which would readily come to the mind of anyone reasonably well read in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans who chose to ponder on references in English drama to death and the terror of dying. Even reading them now, truncated and childishly embellished as they were, Cordelia felt their potent and nostalgic power. The majority of them were from Shakespeare and the obvious choices were there. The longest by far—and how could the sender have resisted it?—was Claudio’s anguished cry from
Measure for Measure:

It was difficult to interpret that familiar passage as a personal threat; but most of the other quotations could be seen as more directly intimidating, hinting, she thought, at some retribution for real or imagined wrongs.

Some care had been taken in the choice of illustration. The skull adorned the lines from
Hamlet—

—as it did a passage which Cordelia thought might be from John Webster, although she couldn’t identify the play.

But, even allowing for the sensitivity of an actress, it would take a fairly robust egotism to wrench these familiar words from their contexts and apply them to oneself; that, or a fear of dying so strong as to be morbid. She took a new notebook from her desk drawer and asked: “How do they arrive?”

“Most come by post in the same type of envelope as the paper and with the address typed. My wife didn’t think to keep any of the envelopes. A few were delivered by hand either at the theatre or at our London flat. One was pushed under the dressing-room door during the run of
Macbeth
. The first half dozen or so were destroyed—best thing to do with them all in my view. These twenty-three are all we now have. I’ve
numbered them in pencil on the back in the order of receipt as far as my wife can remember and with information about when and how each was delivered.”