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‘What I call nose-ology,’ said Sir Graham. ‘But I looked it up in the index of Dr Stern’s book and he doesn’t mention it.’
‘Tell me,’ said Paul, ‘about these two missing boys.’
Vosper glanced at the assistant commissioner, then cleared his throat. ‘Do you know Dulworth Bay?’ he asked conversationally.
‘It’s a fishing village in Yorkshire,’ said Paul. ‘A beautiful spot. We know it well.’
‘Ah, so you probably know St Gilbert’s. It’s a minor public school. Quite a good one, so I’m told. They have a hundred boarders and fifty day boys. The headmaster is a Reverend Dudley Clarke.’
Steve found that her attention was straying. Charlie Vosper lacked the eye for detail which makes for a good raconteur. ‘I suppose,’ she said flippantly, ‘that Young Woodley has run off with the housemaster’s wife?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Vosper. ‘Who is Woodley?’
‘The missing boys are called Baxter,’ said the assistant commissioner. ‘They live with their father in a cottage on the Westerby estate. Their mother died about two years ago. Carry on, Charlie, tell them what happened.’
Vosper signalled to the publicity girl for another drink before he continued. He was a beer drinking man himself, but he was apparently reconciled to the rules being changed for one evening. He sipped a large whisky.
‘Three weeks ago last Tuesday,’ said Vosper, ‘Michael and Roger Baxter and another boy left St Gilbert’s after school and walked the mile or so to the Baxter cottage together. When they reached the cottage Michael Baxter remembered that he’d left a book at the school. It was a book he needed for prep that evening so he went back to fetch it. Left his brother and the other lad sitting on a fence in front of the cottage.’
He took another sip at the whisky. ‘Well, to cut a long story short, those two boys waited for nearly an hour, and then Roger Baxter decided to go back to school and look for his brother. The other boy went home. At seven o’clock that evening Mr Baxter, the father, became worried about the boys and went to the school. You can guess the story. The headmaster hadn’t seen the Baxter boys, they hadn’t gone back to the school, and they haven’t been seen since.’
‘I guessed it,’ said Paul. ‘And how did they get on with their father?’
‘Extremely well.’ Vosper nodded emphatically. ‘There was obviously nothing premeditated about this business, Temple. That was the first thing that interested me. They were perfectly normal teenagers, plenty of friends in the village, they were good at sport, interested in girls. Michael is seventeen and he’s particularly friendly with a Miss Maxwell. She’s a niece of Lord Westerby’s and lives at the Hall.’
‘Diana Maxwell?’ asked Paul.
‘Yes. I thought you might have heard of her. She writes poetry, although you wouldn’t think so to meet her. She looks quite normal.’
‘Charlie popped up to Dulworth Bay,’ explained the assistant commissioner, ‘semi-officially. The local inspector invited him up for a couple of days. That was when nose-ology came into the case. Charlie found that his nostrils were twitching.’
‘There may be nothing to it,’ said Vosper modestly. There was only one peculiar detail I could point to, and that may not be significant. But the Baxter boys share a bedroom; it’s a large, pleasant room, more like a playroom in some ways, and it overlooks the lane. I searched it, of course, read through the exercise books and the adolescent stuff that you’d expect to see. But the interesting oddity was a cricket bat.’
‘A boy’s proudest possession,’ said Paul Temple. ‘I remember how I kept mine oiled and supple—’
‘That’s the picture,’ said Charlie Vosper. ‘Young Roger Baxter is fourteen, and he’d collected the autographs of the St Gilbert’s first eleven on the blade of his bat. Struck me as a funny thing to do, but at my school we used cricket bats to hit each other with when we used them at all. So I made a check on the names, and there was one which I couldn’t account for.’ He smiled, pleased with himself. ‘It wasn’t even a genuine signature. Roger Baxter had written it there himself.’
‘What was the name?’ asked Paul.
‘The name,’ pronounced Inspector Vosper, ‘was Curzon.’
‘Just Curzon? No Christian name or initials?’
‘Just Curzon!’ Vosper placed his empty glass on a nearby table and watched it in the hope that it might be miraculously refilled. But it was every man for himself now and the journalists had the drink pinned at the far end of the room. ‘I wouldn’t claim that the name has any particular significance,’ he said. ‘Only that it was odd. I was looking for oddities by that time.’
‘You see, Temple,’ the assistant commissioner interrupted, ‘that’s nose-ology. Nobody at the school has heard of anyone called Curzon. Charlie asked the boys’ father and the name was completely unknown to him. Unknown to everyone else in Dulworth Bay. So what made Roger Baxter write it on his precious cricket bat?’
‘Charlie has a nose for detail,’ murmured Paul. ‘I wonder what Dr Stern would make of the story?’
Steve sighed and rose to her feet. ‘I know, don’t say it: his book is ridiculous.’
‘Nonsense,’ agreed Sir Graham.
‘Paul, are we going home? I’m tired and the noise in this room is giving me a headache. I can scarcely see who’s doing the shouting through this cigarette smoke. I need some fresh air.’
It was a quarter to ten. Paul took her arm and went in search of Scott Reed.
‘I’m fed up with cocktail parties!’ said Scott, staring at a burn and three whisky stains on the carpet. ‘I do hope it hasn’t been too boring, Temple. Goodbye, Steve, so good of you to have kept those detectives amused.’
Kate Balfour had long since gone home, so Paul pottered about in the kitchen producing the cocoa. He prided himself on his masculine independence. He could make cocoa without burning the milk and boil an egg without the yolk becoming solid. He took the drinks upstairs to the living room flushed with a sense of achievement.
‘I hope we didn’t leave too abruptly,’ he said as he put the tray on the table. ‘You didn’t even tell Dr Stern how much you admire his book.’
‘I didn’t admire it,’ Steve confessed. ‘But I did read the wretched thing, which is why I found the rest of you so irritating.’ She went across to the telephone answering machine on the shelf beside Paul’s desk. The large room was furnished in two halves separated by a step. Paul’s study was the half above the garage. ‘We left abruptly because I didn’t want you to start advising the police how to do their job. I know how they resent it—’
‘I thought Sir Graham was inviting my opinion.’
‘He may have been, but he’s only the assistant commissioner. Charlie Vosper is the man who does the work, and he didn’t want your advice. He’ll make Sir Graham pay for tonight’s little indiscretion, I could see it from his eyes.’
Steve smiled at the thought and absently pressed the button on the automatic answering machine. It whirred gently as the loop tape spun back to the beginning. ‘This is Paul Temple’s residence,’ said the recorded voice. ‘Mr and Mrs Temple are not available, but if you care to leave a message…’
Paul sank back into the armchair and drank his cocoa. He was beginning to hate the anonymous actor whose voice punctuated the messages; he always avoided switching on the machine until he was properly fortified against the day by three cups of coffee.
The telephone rang three times and the actor repeated his piece. ‘Gor,’ said a man in disgust, ‘I’ll write you a bloody letter.’ The telephone clicked, rang three times, and the actor spoke again. It was nerve-racking.
‘Damn,’ said a girl’s voice. ‘Oh well, this is Diana Maxwell. I needed to speak urgently to Mr Temple. Tell him I’ll ring him back, will you? I do hate all these mechanised gadgets!’
Paul rose to his feet in astonishment. ‘What did she say her name was?’
‘Exactly,’ said Steve. ‘Now isn’t that a coincidence?’ She spun the tape back to replay the message. ‘She’s the poet who seemed quite normal to Charlie Vosper.’
‘It isn’t a coincidence,’ Diana Maxwell explained when she telephoned the next day. ‘Inspector Vosper visited me on Friday and he mentioned your literary cocktail party. I think Westerby Hall brought out the democrat in him, but all his resentment was displaced on to your literary shindig. He said you would make him look like a penguin.’
‘Charlie Vosper has always walked like that,’ said Paul. ‘Why did you want to talk to me?’
‘I need your help, Mr Temple. Now that the police are searching for the Baxter brothers I think I’m in danger.’
‘I’m a busy man, Miss Maxwell,’ he said politely, ‘and I never interfere in the work of the police. Inspector Vosper is specially trained to protect people in danger.’ And the danger, Paul reflected, could not be imminent. She had waited three days to telephone him after the inspector’s visit, and a further twenty-four hours had passed before she rang back. ‘In danger from whom?’ Paul asked.
‘Someone by the name of Curzon.’
Paul walked round the desk and sat in his swivel chair. ‘Go on, Miss Maxwell.’ Full marks, he thought, to the inspector’s nose. ‘Tell me about Curzon.’
‘Not over the telephone. Do you know the Three Boars in Greek Street? I’ll meet you there at eight o’clock.’ She clearly did not expect any argument. ‘I’ll recognise you, but just for the record I’m wearing a blue suit, no hat; blue handbag. I’m fair, twenty-three and reasonably pretty.’
Paul smiled to himself. ‘I had formed that impression, Miss Maxwell. You know what Robert Browning said: “The devil hath not in all his quiver’s choice”—’
‘An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice,’ she completed. ‘But for your information, Mr Temple, it was Lord Byron.’
They had to park nearly two hundred yards from the Three Boars. Paul took his wife’s arm and walked through the neon-lit glitter of the Latin quarter. It lacked the vitality and charm, he reflected sadly, of the days when he had first got to know his London. The colour had been replaced by commercialism, it was no longer crime and vice for the simple pleasure of it. Or perhaps nostalgia was playing tricks with his memory.
‘This shouldn’t take us long,’ said Paul. ‘Where do you fancy eating afterwards?’
‘Wheelers?’ suggested Steve.
‘Clever me,’ murmured Paul. ‘I’ve booked a table for nine o’clock.’
‘Clever.’
The Three Boars was just another Soho pub, but the room upstairs was used for poetry readings and so the new literacy was centred on the bars. The barmaid with the flaxen hair and large bosom had been the inspiration of two sonnets, an ode to joy, and a somewhat clinical poem about sex. The clientele, Paul noticed as they went through to the saloon bar, looked conventional enough, except that the restrained young men in grey suits were probably known to the police, and the four scruffy characters shouting at each other in the corner were poets.
‘Blue suit, twenty-three,’ Paul said to himself. The girl by the door was pretty, but she didn’t look like a poet. She looked rather different. She waved.
‘I’m Diana Maxwell,’ she gasped. ‘It’s awfully good of you to come like this. I do appreciate—’
Paul bought the drinks while Steve took care of the small talk. He watched the girl in the mirror behind the bar. A striking figure, elegantly dressed, but for a niece of Lord Westerby surprisingly lacking in poise. She fiddled with her long blonde hair as she talked and kept glancing about the room.
‘Did anyone follow you here?’ she asked when Paul arrived with the drinks. ‘Did you notice a large red saloon car?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Paul. ‘Parking is so bad in London now that gangsters travel by taxi.’
The girl tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Temple. I’m not used to physical danger. Six weeks ago I was leading a perfectly ordinary life. That’s why I’m frightened. They’ve already tried to kill me twice, and sooner or later they’ll succeed.’
‘Now listen,’ said Paul with a laugh, ‘I know that two boys have vanished into thin air, but—’
‘You don’t know much about Curzon, do you?’
‘That’s true,’ Paul agreed. ‘That’s why I’m here, remember? You telephoned me and said you’d been talking to Charlie Vosper. We quoted Byron at each other.’ He broke off. Two men had come into the bar with that purposeful look of debt collectors in search of a defaulter. ‘So tell me about Curzon, Miss Maxwell.’
‘Of course,’ she said quickly. ‘It was good of you to come.’ The two men moved together into the centre of the room. ‘Five weeks ago when I was staying at Westerby Hall I came across—’ The larger of the two men took a pistol from his raincoat pocket and fired it from point-blank range. The girl stared in dismay before spinning backwards off her chair. A sudden cavity appeared in the side of her neck and filled with blood.
‘Get down, Steve, for God’s sake!’ Paul shouted.
The two men ran before the panic started. They were gone when Paul Temple reached the street. He caught a glimpse of a red saloon car driving away. People were screaming in the bar, several men spilled into the street, and when Paul returned he found a crowd staring down at the girl—
Steve was kneeling beside the girl’s head, dabbing ineffectually at the wound with a Kleenex. She looked up at Paul. ‘Diana Maxwell is dead,’ she murmured.
Paul picked up a broken sherry glass from the carpet. A pool of blood had been seeping towards it. ‘If this poor kid is dead,’ he said in bewilderment, ‘somebody has blundered. Because she is not Diana Maxwell.’
Chapter Two (#u613f3d2e-37f8-5fa5-9321-5bc4018e754a)
Dulworth Bay had been a fishing village since Saxon times, and according to local legend it had then been a popular landing place for marauding Danes. The older families were still predominantly blonde-haired, and the growth of modern Britain had made little impact on their culture. The village was built precariously round the bay, ramshackle houses poised on the cliffs and steep winding streets plunging down to the beach.
A sprinkling of artists had moved into the village, and a few weekend people from Leeds and Middlesbrough had bought weekend houses, but they didn’t belong. In Dulworth Bay you remained a foreigner for three generations, and holidaymakers were encouraged to keep moving until they reached Scarborough twenty miles to the south. To the west, a few hundred yards inland, the Whitby moors extended into nothing.
It was a remote spot, yet the police grapevine covered it effectively. A brief telephone call from Inspector Vosper to his north-country colleague ensured that Paul Temple’s visit to Yorkshire was doomed to frustration.
‘But this visit is nothing to do with your Baxter brothers,’ Steve had protested innocently. ‘This is a purely nostalgic holiday. I used to know Whitby years ago.’
‘I don’t,’ the inspector had said doggedly, ‘want you involved.’
Paul Temple had been slightly exasperated. ‘When a girl asks for my help and is then killed sitting beside me, Charlie, I think I become involved. Whether you and I like it or not. I promised I’d help Miss Maxwell, because she was afraid—’
‘Miss Maxwell is alive and well and staying in Yorkshire!’ said Vosper. When they were out of earshot he telephoned Inspector Morgan. The mention of Assistant Commissioner Forbes had clinched it: they would treat Paul Temple and his wife with impeccable good manners and absolute inscrutability.
They were staying at the Victoria Hotel in Whitby, as a gesture towards diplomacy. It would look less, Paul had thought, as though they were investigating the Dulworth Bay mystery. But Inspector Morgan paid them a courtesy visit on the first morning after their arrival. ‘Just to see whether I can be of help,’ he said diplomatically. ‘Mrs Temple may have forgotten her way around after all those years in the south…’ Inspector Morgan was stationed in Whitby, which he clearly thought would be convenient for them all. ‘Where were you thinking of visiting?’
Steve mentioned St Gilbert’s, ‘Although I think I can find it without having to trouble you, Inspector.’
‘St Gilbert’s?’ he repeated inscrutably. ‘I don’t suppose you’re telling me that Mrs Temple wants to visit her old school?’ He seemed about to wink at Paul. ‘Because St Gilbert’s is a boys’ school.’ He stared smugly at Steve’s trim figure.
‘One of the masters is an old friend of my uncle’s,’ she explained. ‘I haven’t seen him since I was fourteen. He was the Latin master in those days, which is probably why I still find amo-amas-amat slightly romantic. I’ve invited him to dinner this evening.’
‘Sounds as though it should be fun,’ said the inspector. ‘Have you planned many other trips down memory lane?’
‘Westerby Hall?’ Paul suggested.
‘Westerby Hall,’ the inspector repeated with impeccable good manners. ‘Ah yes, that’s where Lord Westerby lives.’
‘Quite.’
‘I don’t,’ he said cannily, ‘know whether Miss Maxwell is staying with him at the moment.’
‘Never mind,’ said Paul. ‘If she isn’t there I’m sure the walk will have done us good. Our journey won’t be wasted. There’s nothing like the Yorkshire moors—’
‘I did hear a rumour that Miss Maxwell is dead.’
‘False, Inspector Morgan, as you well know!’
Paul Temple had tried to find Miss Maxwell in London, but she had proved elusive. The flat which she shared with a girl called Bobbie Jameson had been empty when he called. Miss Jameson was dead and Miss Maxwell had left for Yorkshire. Paul had let himself in the front door with a sliver of perspex against the lock, and he had spent nearly half an hour searching for something to indicate what the girls were mixed up with. But he found nothing.
It was obvious that Diana Maxwell used the flat merely as a pied-a-terre when she was in London. There were few possessions or papers belonging to her, and most of the photographs were of Bobbie Jameson. She had been the girl in the pub.
The instinct for self-preservation which had prompted Diana Maxwell to send a substitute had also led her straight back to Yorkshire when death had struck. But three hundred miles, Paul reflected sourly, was not very far if someone was determined to kill you.
Despite his boast to Inspector Morgan Paul drove out to Westerby Hall. He saw no reason to overdo the healthy life. The Yorkshire countryside was spectacular, but better appreciated from behind the wheel of a car. By foot it could reduce a man to exhaustion and madness. It made a man feel small. Westerby Hall was a mile inland from Dulworth Bay, nestling in a valley as if in hiding.
‘Let’s walk up to the house, darling,’ Steve suggested as a compromise to physical fitness. ‘We can look at these incredible wrought iron gates. I do believe they’re by Tijou.’
They parked by the monumental gates. Steve examined them ecstatically, talking of Tijou’s work at Hampton Court and speculating on the likelihood of the master travelling so far north.
There was a stream running along the high brown stone wall of the estate, and Paul’s eyes followed the glittering band of water through the valley. He could hear a noise like angry wasps approaching, and then in the distance he noticed a tiny green sports car driving much too fast down the hill from the moors. Its wheels visibly left the road as it leaped across a hump backed bridge and the noise of the engine became a roar.
‘Woman driver,’ said Paul.
Steve had decided the gates were superb imitations. She turned away reluctantly to watch the sports car. ‘She looks like a woman after your own heart,’ said Steve ironically. ‘Do you think someone’s chasing her?’
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ Paul said with a laugh.
