“What on earth for?” I groped through memories of so many detective stories for the right procedure. “Anyway, have you got a warrant?”
“If we have to get one, we shall get one. In the meantime, have you any reason to be worried about what we might find?”
I had no reason at all to be worried; but that didn’t stop me being worried. There was something very threatening in the atmosphere.
And they soon gave me reason to worry. Once they had driven me home the two of them prowled from room to room with a hideous determination to find something where there could not possibly be anything to find.
“Look after things yourself, Mr. Milburn?” asked Emerson.
“I have a cleaner in twice a week.”
“Yes. All very tidy Systematic. Do your own cooking?”
“When I’m not taking clients or publishers out,” I said as loftily as possible, “or being taken out.”
“A very agreeable arrangement, sir.”
They peered about in the kitchenette, sifting my spice pots and condiments and jars of this, that and the other to and fro. It took a further fifteen minutes of trawling before the detective constable called from the bathroom to show the little phial tucked under the ball-cock of the lavatory system.
“Not alcoholic,” the inspector said again. “A different kind of poison. Far quicker.”
It was grotesque. “D’you seriously think I’d be clumsy enough to hide something, whatever it is, in such an obvious place? If I’d had anything to hide, that is.”
“In a hurry, last night? Going to tidy up when you’d got your breath back?”
“Last night.” I drew a deep breath and tried to keep my voice steady. “If you ask Mrs. Brooke about last night, she’s got to admit she was muddled. The shock of it, all right. Must have thrown her. She’s simply got to confirm that we were there together, and she drove me home, and—”
“No, Mr. Milburn. Mrs. Brooke was away. She had gone to stay with a publishing friend. She was apparently scared of the hostility between her husband and yourself, and when she heard you were coming round she didn’t want to be there.”
“A publishing friend?”
“A Miss Nina Whiteley. She went there for protection.”
A terrible, incredible suspicion was dawning. I thought of Gemma paying her usual quick visit to the bathroom that last time she was here. Thought of her strange silences and that recent conspiratorial expression of hers.
“Look,” I said. “Exactly how did Crispin die?”
“Cyanide poisoning. And you wouldn’t know that, Mr. Milburn? Even though there were only two glasses in the room, one of them with traces of cyanide. And both with fingerprints on which may just possibly turn out to be yours, Mr. Milburn.”
“And once we’ve had the stuff in this bottle analysed….” His constable let the words hang in the air.
“I think we’ll continue this down at the station,” said his inspector. And he began to recite the rigmarole I already knew off by heart, thanks to those client authors who went boringly through it every few chapters: ‘“but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court….”
In the interview room my solicitor sat stony-faced beside me. For all the moral or legal support he gave, he might as well have been sitting alongside the policemen on the other side.
The accusation was that I had been pestering Mrs. Brooke, and on one occasion had raped her when she was visiting me to discuss her husband’s work. She had made no complaint at the time because negotiations with her husband’s publisher had been at a tricky stage and she did not dare to antagonise me. But then Crispin Brooke began to suspect, and had called me round that evening for a showdown.
“And you lost your temper, and there was a fight.”
“A fight? Me and Crispin? He was ex-SAS, you know. I wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
“Neighbours confirm there was a shouting match. It could be heard halfway down the street.”
Of course. Gemma opening the window and then not saying another word that might give away her presence.
“As you say, Mr. Milburn, picking a direct fight with a highly trained soldier with the deceased’s courageous record was risky. So in the end it had to be something subtler. If you can call cyanide subtle.”
“Cyanide’s agonizing.” I knew that much, again, from my clients’ fictional outpourings. “He’d have screamed his head off.”
“Exactly. That, too, was heard halfway down the street.”
“But what time was this?”
Detective Inspector Emerson glanced at his sidekick, who studied his notes and said: “About twenty-three fifteen, according to the neighbour two doors down.”
“But I was home by then. Gemma had dropped me off, and I was in the flat well before eleven.” I turned triumphantly to my solicitor, who stared dispassionately at the table.
“You have a witness to this, Mr. Milburn?”
“I’ve shown you, I live alone. But check on her car. Someone must have seen it parked round the corner from their house. Or dropping me off. She did drop me off.”
Then I went wild. I had been hoping that the nightmare could be driven away, that commonsense would prevail, that Gemma would come to the rescue and somehow it could all be sorted out.. But I knew starkly what had been going on; and I let fly.
Couldn’t they see it? It was a put-up job. The two women—two lovers. damn them—had planned it from way back, maybe from that very first innocuous meeting.
Drawing two bloody stupid men into the trap. Despising, us, wanting to get rid of both of us.
The taste in my mouth was as bitter as any poison. “As a literary agent,” I said, “I suppose I ought to have learnt to be cynical about such things.”
Part of the package: wasn’t that what Gemma had looked so smug about? She had gone to bed with me, suffered the indignity of something for which she had no appetite, gone through the motions…all the time saving her real self for her woman, her real lover.
“Crispin wouldn’t have been likely to go along with a straightforward divorce.” I was trying to reason with those implacable faces. “Least of all when it was something he’d regard as intolerably kinky. So it had to be a matter of getting rid of the obnoxious husband, and saddling another man with the blame. That way, Gemma inherits the royalties which have survived from those past successes, and she and the Whiteley woman can live happily ever after.”
“Very ingenious, sir.”
“You can’t be that stupid!” I raged. “You can’t let them get away with it.”
“As
