More Dead Than Alive (David Mallin Detective series Book 15) Read online

  “The funny little man on my left is in insurance,” I explained. “Naturally, he’s here. No… listen, David, there’s been no claim – it’s too soon. He was here before. He’d have to be, because of the huge cover they gave Konrad on his illusions. He was here to see the new one, and decide whether it was too dangerous.”

  David smiled across the table at Clarice and said, not looking at me: “Dangerous? Surely not. That’s one of the points of the thing – to look dangerous, kind of breathtaking. But there’s never any real danger.”

  And Auden Sundry took him up on that, as I suppose he’d have to. “Oh, but I assure you, there’s sometimes very real danger. Don’t you remember Chung Fu Li, who used to catch bullets in his teeth?”

  George lifted an eyebrow, fork poised. “Catch them?”

  Something in his tone cut through the general chatter. There was a sudden silence. I saw Anthony rest his hand on Amaryllis’s on the table. She did not withdraw it. Sundry seized on the pause, plunging in, laughing.

  “My dear sir, don’t sound so incredulous. Qf course it was an illusion. Yet one evening he failed and was shot dead on the stage.” There was a murmur of protest. He basked in the sensation. “It was never explained, because nobody ever knew how the illusion was done, because he hadn’t filed details in our archives. But certainly he died.”

  “And cost my company a cool fifty thou,” cut in Fisher. “Before my time, mind you. But it’s a legend at Head Office. These people cover themselves heavily to allow for accidents during the performance – or rehearsal. Pure theatrical publicity…”

  “Oh, I can’t accept that,” Sundry protested, but amused.

  “No? Then why do they bill themselves, these escapologists, as the man they won’t insure.”

  “And why,” demanded Sundry, “do you insure them, and quietly collect the premiums – and make damn sure they’re safe before you offer your fabled double-indemnity? Now that’s what I call publicity.”

  But they were teasing each other, along the length of the table. Clarice, aware that her dinner was proceeding smoothly, was smiling quietly to herself. David cleared his throat.

  “And that’s what Konrad Klein had, was it, double-indemnity?”

  Martin Fisher was fractionally cool. “I’d countersigned the policy.”

  “So it wasn’t dangerous, this thing of his?”

  “Of course it was dangerous,” said Amaryllis sharply. “I warned him…”

  “Warned?” said David gently. “Were you expecting something to happen?”

  She moved her head impatiently. The sweet was being served. George was patting his lips with his napkin, looking interested.

  “Not,” put in Anthony, “what did happen, I’m sure.”

  But she looked at him angrily, not welcoming his support. He saw it, and was momentarily hesitant. Then he recovered.

  “Though I did expect something.” He looked round the table. “I think we all did. All except dear, loyal Amaryllis, who couldn’t see he was finished, that this new cabinet of his was a failure, and that he was going totally and steadily insane.” He looked up at the housekeeper. “None for me, thank you.” And reached for his cigarettes.

  There was a shocked silence at this calmly vicious outburst, and Clarice bent her head, one hand going up to cover her face. Beside me, Fisher was nodding, nodding. He had to agree, was pleased to, but I could feel that he was tense with dislike. Beyond David, Sundry took it up with dignity. I had a tendency to forget that he, too, would no doubt be considered past it – in his sixties now. He was probably slowing; if speed was all. But the French word for conjuring says it better – legerdemain, meaning the speed of the hand. But now Sundry became the President for a few moments, gained vastly in dignity and stature, and calmly leveled a reprimand at Anthony.

  “Nobody who matters ever considered your father as a failure, Anthony. The Magic Circle held him in great respect, or why would they ask me to be here, as their observer, when he gave his first showing?”

  Anthony reacted to the dignity. “And you, sir, how did you react to father’s corny old cabinet trick? Lord, you must all be bored to tears with vanishing cabinets, in all their variations. Shut somebody inside, slide in a few swords… what ability or technique does that need? It’s all in the cabinet—”

  “Swords!” said Sundry sharply. “But he was using bullets.”

  “Really!” Fisher protested. “You make me feel so… so hasty.”

  “In signing the policy?” asked David with interest.

  But Fisher had intended it as a humorous diversion. He bobbed happily. “I’d got complete confidence in it. I’d have gone in myself if it’d been twice as wide.”

  I had seen the cabinet, barely eighteen inches square. Fisher had a forty-two waist. We all laughed. Well, nearly all. George was looking unhappy.

  The small diversion had distracted the attention from Clarice, which had obviously been Fisher’s intention. He acted the part of the jolly buffoon, but more than once, I had discovered him using remarkable sensitivity. I sneaked a look at her. Clarice was patting the corners of her eyes with a tiny handkerchief and trying to smile. When she spoke, it was quietly but at once, she had the full attention of the whole table.

  “Martin is very kind,” she murmured. “But it does suit him – or his company, anyway – to believe that Konrad took his own life. No… no protests, Martin, please. It’s part of your job, and we all understand. But Auden will tell you that poor Konrad, though he might have been close to a breakdown, was far too… too self-assured to take his own life.” She glanced down. The next words were painful for her. “He was too proud to destroy what he considered to be one of God’s perfect creations… himself.”

  Anthony burst in: “He was a bloody—” But Amaryllis rested the prongs of her fork on the back of his hand, and he gasped to silence.

  “And,” went on Clarice, “he was too professional not to have committed suicide in such a way that it would appear as something else…”

  She blinked. David touched my arm. It was almost exactly what I had said myself.

  “So… what do you believe?” he asked gently.

  “I believe there was an accident.”

  “Involving this cabinet of his?”

  “Yes.”

  Beside me, Martin Fisher moved uneasily. “If you’ll excuse me, Clarice, it’s what you’d prefer me to believe.” He looked round the table. “The cabinet was against the inside of the door. Konrad was an honorable man. It’s just what he would do, if he’d intended to take his own life, just to make it clear that no one else could have been involved.”

  Clarice was shaking her head stubbornly. “An accident.”

  David breathed in my ear: “The double-indemnity clause.”

  “No, David!”

  And George’s eyes were on me, cynical and amused. Then he spoke with heavy politeness to Clarice. “You’re saying that he’d fake a suicide as accident, just so that a fraud could be committed on the insurance company. We’ve heard that he was proud and honorable, but when it comes to it he was capable of being a cheat and a crook…”

  “No,” she whispered, choking.

  “It was what you ruddy well said,” he claimed, looking round for support, “That’s how I heard it. And just because it looks like suicide you’re asking us to accept that he didn’t get round to using his natural deception – and so it must have been something else.”

  Clarice was staring at me with pain, accusing me of inflicting this ungracious and unsubtle man on her. I met her eyes, almost flinching.

  “It’s what you said, Clarice,” I told her. “His life had become so involved with deliberate illusion – which is really fraud when you come to think about it – that his death would have to be, too. Isn’t that what you said?”

  I thought she might faint, she was so pale. “It’s what I meant, Elsa. But I… I loved him so dearly.”

  “And you wouldn’t have him leave you like this,” said George,
leaning back in his chair heavily, “penniless, when he’d promised you he’d be worth more dead than alive.”

  Clarice took a deep breath. “Well, all right,” she snapped abruptly, the color flooding to her cheeks. “If you don’t want to help me, you can leave. I’m only sorry I made up your bed. If all you can do is make snide remarks…”

  “Oh, but he’s splendid,” cut in Anthony. “We mustn’t lose him. He looks facts right in the eye.”

  David had said nothing. He knew George better than I did; I had never been with them when they were actually on a case. I wondered at David’s silence. But now he spoke confidently.

  “George sometimes looks beyond the facts. What’re you getting at, George?”

  “Accident!” George snorted. “What flaming accident would make him disappear into fresh air? I don’t think anybody’s thought about it. This Konrad, he doesn’t sound accident-prone to me. And if you won’t accept suicide, which is the obvious thing, then there’s something else as feasible as an accident, and we don’t want to get involved with that.”

  “He’s talking about murder,” said David lightly, and the fork clattered from Amaryllis’s hand to the floor. “Which is plain nonsense, of course, because of the cabinet against the door. Come on, George, admit it. Plain nonsense.”

  George lumbered to his feet. “Let’s go and look at that blasted room,” he said.

  I had had a presentiment about this. He was not the George Coe I knew, vastly gentle and capable of ridiculous sentimentality. I assumed that David would be embarrassed for him, but no. He pushed back his chair, and he was quite calm, even smiling, when he took my arm.

  “Do something. David,” I whispered.

  “Something?”

  “To stop him. He’s like a wild bull. He’ll upset everybody.”

  “This is George, love. I can’t change him.” He grinned, challenging me. “And I couldn’t manage without him. If he leaves, I do too.”

  “Sometimes I hate you, David.”

  “I know.” He looked round before they all melted away. “Shall we all go up?” he asked.

  There was silence. Amaryllis gave an exaggerated shudder. “Not for me.”

  “Especially you, my dear. You must have been there.”

  “Of course I was not!”

  “You were his assistant. How could he experiment with his cabinet when his assistant wasn’t there?”

  She was rapidly losing interest in him, I was glad to see. Her poise was brittle. “Earlier. I was with him earlier. But I left him alone to play with his dummies.”

  David nodded, leading her on.

  “Oh, you’ll see,” she told him angrily. “You don’t need me. He used dummies in the cabinet when he fired into it. When there was no bullet in the dummy, then that was a success. You don’t need me.” She tossed her head. The slim neck was beginning to show the first wrinkles.

  “But perhaps he did,” David suggested, and something in her cracked. Her voice rose.

  “He wanted me inside the damn thing!” she cried hysterically.

  “Ah! Then you had no faith in it?”

  “Go and check the dummies yourself!” she screamed. “Count the bullet holes, why don’t you. See if you’d have stepped inside it!”

  Then she turned away and walked rapidly down the ballroom, her head high but her movements so unco-ordinated that all the smooth flow of her limbs had become harsh.

  I watched her walk away, and thought: but it was Konrad whose life was so heavily insured, when the danger was to her. Though he had been an escapologist earlier on, so no doubt the insurance cover was no more than theatrical advertisement after all.

  “She walks,” said David, “like some sort of mechanical doll.”

  I looked at him sharply, though of course he couldn’t have known. But one of Amaryllis’s stage characters as a ballet dancer had been the doll in The Tales of Hoffmann. I looked back at her. The hand reaching for the doorknob of the far door was moving with stiff blindness, a ballet movement.

  Perhaps Amaryllis hadn’t been quite so upset as she’d sounded.

  “I’ll show you the room,” I said quietly.

  Three

  In the end, only Auden Sundry and Anthony went with us to Konrad s laboratory-room.

  We took oil-lamps; David, immediately behind me, carrying one, and Anthony with the other at the rear. The staircase up the Tower was not illuminated, although there was a complex of wiring in the workroom, for Konrad’s bench.

  The door into the Tower is beside the one to the battlements, opening from the Grand Gallery. The castle now seemed silent; it was its perpetual silence that had so haunted me the first few days I was there, the thick walls so effectively absorbing sound. The door closed behind us with a thud that sounded muffled.

  I would have preferred not to lead. The stone staircase up the tower ran in a spiral round its perimeter, the walls pressing in at each shoulder, and because of the continuing curve, the light danced in front of me, never quite reaching beyond the bend in front, and never illuminating more than four or five tapered steps ahead. Our voices reached beyond us and were lost.

  I have never counted the steps. I had, always, to count the doors we passed, though I was told later that the latch on Konrad’s door was different, more modern, than the rest, if you could call a huge wrought-iron ring modern. And his was the only one not rusted solid. At last, I stopped.

  “This is it.”

  I was reluctant to open that door. We stood, here, on one of the flat landings opposite each door, but these were only three feet wide. There was not much room, and the door was deeply set, heavy, oppressive. David reached past me.

  “Let me.”

  He turned the ring and thrust the door open. It moved without sound. I felt quickly for the light switch inside, and the room was flooded with light.

  It was naturally circular, some thirty feet across, the smooth curve of its walls broken only where the shape of the outer stairs intruded the inner wall of part of its spiral. Directly opposite the door was the only window, at that time closed. We moved inside. Anthony produced a slim cigarette-case and offered me one, smiling, as much as to say: “You see, I’m not such a cynical devil, really.” But I was out of breath, and refused. Besides, I still thought he was.

  The floor was bare boards, heavy, rough boards, which echoed as we walked on them, there being so few floor coverings. This place was purely practical. In it, Konrad Klimax had created his illusions. Some of the old ones still stood around, not recognizable in their intention, but strangely pitiful and sordid away from their stage splendor. To one side, well clear of the door or window, was the workbench, and though tools and machinery have no specific meaning for me, it was clear that the equipment was comprehensive, and that Konrad had made all his equipment himself. Up above me, the shadows ran high, the light not reaching because the pendant lamps were hung from open joists well clear of the actual ceiling.

  David said: “It was… what time, Elsa?”

  “After dinner. This time, perhaps.”

  “Then it’d be dark. Like now?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you spoke of rushing up the stairs, and down again. In the dark?”

  “We brought lamps, just like now. They’re always to hand in case the power goes.”

  “Must have been unpleasant for you,” he said, and I loved that tender undertone in his voice.

  “Yes.” I remembered my terror. “Yes.” I looked away from Anthony, who was smiling. “The window wasn’t closed.”

  David walked across and threw it open. It opened outwards, and the brisk wind at once caught it back against the outside wall. Lamps swung and swirled shadows up the wall, and the chill struck straight through my thin dress.

  “Like this?” David called back.

  “Yes. And just as cold.”

  “He wouldn’t want to work with it open, then. So why did he open it?”

  “To get out,” suggested George. “To climb out.”


  But David had had to reach right out to retrieve the window catch. I caught my breath, although I had done so, too, on that night. The window, however, was sunk into an embrasure a foot deep, angling in to the actual opening, so that he could rest his stomach and chest on it for support. Easier for him than for me. He hesitated, looking upwards and down, before closing the window, and I knew what he would have seen by the light of the weak moon, harassed by racing clouds.

  He would have seen the bare, naked outer face of the Tower, plunging down to its origin on the cliff edge, and beyond that down again, the sea-slicked cliffs vertical for a further hundred feet, and finally, the piled waves crashing into the cliff over peaks of rock, the water sucking and plunging round them.

  The window slammed shut and David turned. The opening, though tall and narrow, would have allowed him to fall through.

  “He could not possibly have lived,” he decided.

  George was prowling, hands in pockets, not touching anything. He did, though, pause at the small table to one side of the window, some ten feet into the room. He was looking down at the pistol which lay on it. Nothing else – just the pistol. He turned and asked me:

  “Was this here then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just here? Exactly like this?”

  “I… I think so. Though the police would’ve looked at it, and maybe moved it…”

  “Police?” said David.

  This, I knew, was one of his bland and innocent acts. I had mentioned the police to him earlier. He cocked an eyebrow at Anthony. “You sent for the police?”

  “Who else could we send for – the fire brigade?”

  David ignored the sarcasm. “You entered this room. The cabinet was hard against the door…”

  “There it is, standing by the wall,” put in Sundry. “Yes. We’ll consider that later. Perhaps Anthony will tell us exactly what happened.”

  “Surely your wife—”

  “From you, if you don’t mind.”

  Anthony shrugged. “You’ve already heard… there were the three of us, Clarice, Elsa and myself. The lights were on. The draught almost tore the door out of my hands, and your wife ran to look out of the window, then she struggled with it a bit and managed to shut it, and latched it. The women were… I suppose you’d call it shocked. I mean, it was staring us in the face. The room empty and the window open. But I had to make sure he’d… er… gone. The cabinet was the first idea, but he wasn’t in there.”