Murder at Dunleith

Chapter One: A Letter in January

The letter came on the coldest Tuesday of the year, wedged between a gas bill and a catalogue from a saleroom in Chelsea, and Nigel Spenlow very nearly did not open it until after his breakfast.

He was sixty-two years old, five years out of Scotland Yard, and he had cultivated in retirement a set of small ceremonies that he defended with the seriousness other men reserve for religion. Tea first, brewed four minutes. Then the fire, coaxed rather than bullied. Then the post, opened with a paperknife at the writing table by the window, where the grey light off the Bayswater street fell across his hands.

The envelope was heavy cream stock. The hand was black ink, sloping, impatient, and it had pressed hard enough in places to tear the paper.

He knew that writing. He had seen it once on the back of a watercolour, and once on the flyleaf of an exhibition catalogue, and both times it had belonged to Basil Moresby.

Spenlow slit the envelope.

*My dear Spenlow,*

*You will think me either drunk or deranged, and I promise you I am neither, though I have had cause lately to wish I were both.*

*We have not spoken in eleven years — the Fenwick sale, if you recall it, when you outbid a Belgian for a small Sisley and I told you that you had paid twice what it was worth. You had, but you were right to. I have thought of you often since, not because of the picture but because of the way you looked at the room while everyone else looked at the pictures.*

*I need a man who looks at rooms.*

*Something is happening in my house. I cannot put it plainly in a letter because plainness would make it sound absurd, and I have reached the point where I cannot bear to be laughed at. I will say only this: for a month past, someone under my roof has been doing me a slow injury, and I believe the injury will not stop at property. I believe that when the person has finished with my pictures, the person will start on me.*

*I have not gone to the police. What would I say? That my paintings have been scratched? They would send a constable to look at the window latches and go away thinking me a rich old fool with nerves.*

*Come to Dunleith for the weekend of the sixteenth. Bring a friend if you like — better, in fact, if you do; a second pair of eyes and a reason to explain your presence. I will tell you everything on Friday night. There is more than the pictures. There is a matter of business that has become a matter of honesty, and I mean to settle it on Saturday, and I should very much like a former detective standing at my elbow when I do.*

*Trains from Paddington to Kemble. Ask at the station for a car to Chessingford.*

*Do not fail me. I am not a nervous man, Spenlow, but I have begun to sleep with the light on.*

*Yours,*
*Basil Moresby*

Spenlow read it twice. Then he set it down, went to the window, and stood looking out at the snow that had begun in the night and was now coming down in earnest, filling the area railings and softening the parked cars into pale animals.

Thirty-one years at the Yard teach a man to distrust the word *urgent*. Nine letters in ten that begin with a plea for a detective's eye end in a lost dog or a jealous husband. But Spenlow had also learned that when a proud man writes down the words *I have begun to sleep with the light on*, he has already crossed a border he had no intention of crossing, and that such men are very rarely wrong about the direction of the danger, even when they are wrong about everything else.

He went out at eleven, walked three streets through slush to a house in Craven Terrace, and rang the bell.

Dr Alfred Hopwood opened it himself, in a cardigan the colour of porridge, with reading spectacles pushed up into hair that had gone white a decade ago and had never quite forgiven him for it. He was seventy, thin as a heron, and had spent forty years listening to the chests of the moderately wealthy of West London before deciding, quite abruptly, that he would rather read.

"You're wet," said Hopwood.

"I'm cold. Those are different."

"Come in. I've got the fire and a very poor novel. A Frenchman is murdered in a lighthouse and the door is bolted and there's a great deal of nonsense about tides."

Spenlow followed him in, shook the snow from his hat, and handed over the letter without a word.

Hopwood read it standing, one hand fishing his spectacles down onto his nose. When he finished he did not speak at once. He turned the page over as though there might be something on the back, which there was not, and then he looked up with an expression that Spenlow had seen exactly twice before: the look of a boy who has been offered a treat and is trying, out of dignity, not to grin.

"Basil Moresby," said Hopwood. "The Moresby? The one who painted the Chancellor?"

"And two archbishops and a duchess and the whole board of a shipping line. Yes."

"And he thinks somebody means to kill him."

"He thinks somebody is *preparing* to. There's a difference, and it's the difference I don't like." Spenlow took the letter back and folded it. "A man who is preparing is a man with a plan. Plans are patient. Patient people are the dangerous sort."

Hopwood took his spectacles off. "You're going."

"I am going. He's asked me to bring a friend."

"I don't suppose," said Hopwood, with enormous casualness, "that you have anybody in mind."

"I thought of Mrs Pargeter at the greengrocer's, but she doesn't play bridge."

"You are a cruel man and I shall need a small bag."

They travelled on the Friday, the sixteenth of January, on the 10.20 from Paddington, in a compartment that smelled of damp wool and cold ash. Beyond Swindon the country turned white and stayed white, hedges reduced to grey stitching across fields, the sky the colour of a dirty sheet. Hopwood had brought three books and read none of them; he spent the journey extracting from Spenlow everything Spenlow knew about the Moresby household, which was not much.

"Married again three years ago," Spenlow said. "Abigail. I've never met her. There was a good deal in the papers about it because she is a great deal younger — thirty-seven now, I believe, to his sixty-seven."

"Thirty years."

"Thirty years. There's a son by the first marriage. Malcolm. Thirty-five or so. He wanted to paint and could not, which I'm told is a worse fate than wanting to paint and never trying."

"Money?"

"A great deal. Moresby was the most expensive brush in England for twenty years. He also collected. There's a gallery at Dunleith that people write letters to the *Times* about." Spenlow watched a farm go by, a black dog standing in the yard barking at the train. "And there is a dealer. Geoffrey Trent. He has handled Moresby's work since before the war."

"You say that name," said Hopwood, "the way you say the word *chiropractor*."

"Do I? I've no reason to. I've met him twice. He is charming, he is knowledgeable, and he has the finest overcoat in London." Spenlow smiled slightly. "But Moresby writes that there is a matter of business that has become a matter of honesty. A painter's business is his dealer."

Hopwood sat back. Outside, the snow had begun again, small hard flakes that ticked against the glass.

"You've decided already," he said. "Before you've set foot in the place."

"I've decided nothing. I've noticed something. They are not the same, and a man who confuses them ought not to be allowed near a case." Spenlow reached up for his bag as the train began to slow. "But I will tell you this much, Hopwood, and then I shall say nothing more until we've had dinner. In my experience, when a wealthy man is frightened, he is frightened of the person who is standing closest to his money."

The car that met them at Kemble was a mud-spattered Austin driven by a boy of nineteen with chilblains, who took them nine miles through lanes so narrow the hedges scraped both doors at once. Chessingford appeared at the bottom of a valley: a church, a bridge over the Coln, a public house with its lamp already burning at half past three in the afternoon, thirty houses of golden stone gone dun under the snow.

And above the village, on a shoulder of hill, standing dark against the white behind it, a long grey manor with a row of six tall windows down its western side, all of them catching the last of the light at once, so that from the bridge it looked for a moment as though the house had turned and opened six bright eyes to watch them come.

"Well," said Hopwood softly. "That's Dunleith, I take it."

"That's Dunleith," said Spenlow.