Paul Temple and the Curzon Case (A Paul Temple Mystery) Read online

  FRANCIS DURBRIDGE

  Paul Temple and the Curzon Case

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by

  Coronet 1972

  Copyright © Francis Durbridge 1972

  All rights reserved

  Francis Durbridge has asserted his right under the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

  Cover image © Shutterstock.com

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008125745

  Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008125752

  Version: 2015-07-24

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also in This Series

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Dulworth Bay was a noisy place at night when the tide came in. The sea broke angrily against the shore, retreated with a rush of sand and pebbles and then crashed forward again. Ridges of white foam caught the moonlight as they rode towards the beach. The darkness was like a soundproof blanket pierced by a few stars and the distant lighthouse. The rowing boat a hundred yards out from the shore was alone, cut off by the noise.

  A man rested on his oars and looked blindly into the sky; among the sounds of the sea he could distinguish the approaching drone of a twin-engined Hawker Siddeley; his eyes traced a path towards the coast as the aeroplane passed overhead. The man flashed a lamp three times in signal.

  The drone of the engines grew louder again as the aeroplane circled back. Then the man saw a winking orange wing light passing through the clouds, dropping low out of the sky and swinging towards the cliffs. He didn’t see the aircraft until the roar of the engines became a screech of agony several seconds later. He heard a dull explosion, and simultaneously a lick of white light shot into the sky. Fire billowed down the cliffs and burned itself out in the sea.

  The man in the boat watched for nearly a minute, and then quite slowly he pulled towards the wreckage.

  Chapter One

  ‘Here’s to crime,’ Scott Reed said benevolently, raising his glass in a toast to the manifestly law-abiding company. ‘And long may it prosper.’

  Paul Temple looked from his publisher to the circle of guests with drinks in their hands. ‘One eminent French criminologist has argued that there are no crimes, there are only criminals.’

  ‘That was Professor Saleilles,’ said Steve Temple deflatingly. She turned to Scott Reed. ‘Don’t worry, Scott. The French professor was much less scientific than your Dr Stern. He hadn’t done experiments with rats.’

  The publisher looked startled. ‘I’m pleased to hear it.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the man whose book on crime was the excuse for the party. ‘Did Dr Stern do experiments with rats?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Steve. ‘He describes them in detail.’ She laughed teasingly. ‘I thought you always read the books you publish?’

  Scott Reed sighed. ‘I don’t always understand them.’

  Dr Albert Stern was not looking the part of a literary lion. He stood in the corner of the room watching the throng of journalists, criminologists and novelists with the apprehension of a man caught in lewd company. There was a clutch of thriller writers discussing their overseas sales, two policemen looking as if they were guarding the drink, and an assistant commissioner from Scotland Yard was sitting on the sofa reading The Psychology of Crime. Dr Stern had been told to chat up the booksellers, but the booksellers all seemed to know each other and they preferred to talk among themselves.

  ‘Do rats,’ Scott Reed asked after careful thought, ‘steal from each other and murder their wives?’

  ‘Only when they come from bad homes,’ said Steve.

  She glanced at herself in the ornately carved mirror above the imitation Adam fireplace. She was wearing a sheer maxi dress with varying degrees of subtle see-through, printed in bands of colour that ranged through blues, reds and mauves. Captivating, Steve thought to herself. So much more restrained than the vulgarly fashionable girl Scott Reed employed as his publicity officer.

  Steve half listened to somebody arguing that capital punishment gave added zest to a murder mystery, while her husband’s group discussed crime in general. She took a dry martini from a passing tray. As the only person in the room who had read the doctor’s book Steve felt a certain aloofness towards the gossip. She felt that Paul was being obtuse about it.

  ‘How can you write a book on the psychology of crime?’ he had asked three times on the way to the party. ‘There are so many different types of crime. I mean, you could write about delinquency or the aggressive impulse—’

  ‘He does,’ Steve had said patiently.

  ‘Criminals are not personality types,’ Paul had continued. ‘They’re people who’ve committed a crime, that’s all, by sudden temper or under provocation, under stress. Unless they’re psychopaths.’

  ‘That’s what he says,’ Steve had murmured.

  ‘Absurd!’

  An elderly lady novelist was bearing down upon Steve with a flourish of her stole and the glint of a storyteller in her eye. Steve turned quickly to the police inspector standing beside her. ‘I didn’t realise crime was so dull,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re going to make many arrests this evening.’

  Inspector Vosper was hurt. ‘I’m here in my private capacity,’ he protested. ‘Mr Temple said I should masquerade as a human being for one evening.’

  ‘What happens when the clock strikes midnight?’ Steve asked him.

  Charlie Vosper looked every inch a policeman with his blue shirt and black tie, plain clothes and cropped grey hair. ‘I turn back into a pumpkin.’ He prodded a finger confidentially into Steve’s left arm. ‘What do you think of this psychology nonsense, eh? How many burglars do you suppose Dr Stein has caught red-handed?’

  ‘Dr Stern,’ she corrected him. ‘I don’t suppose he—’

  ‘Exactly. Would he recognise an embezzler if he stood next to one in a bank? Unless he was wearing a mask!’

  ‘He explains in his book—’

  ‘Books are all very well, Mrs Temple,’ the inspector said heavily. ‘But a policeman’s job is ninety per cent routine hard work and ten per cent knowing the crimin
al and pinning the rap on him. Dr Stein can’t teach me how to apprehend a murderer.’

  ‘That’s what he says,’ Steve murmured. ‘Dr Stern.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’

  Steve sat wearily on the sofa by the assistant commissioner. ‘What do you make of it, Sir Graham?’ she asked. ‘Are you wishing Paul hadn’t dragged you along to this party?’

  ‘Not really, although the place is rather short on pretty girls. Only one attractive female in sight.’ Sir Graham Forbes closed the book and looked about the room. He was a dapper man with a bouncy, military manner, a military moustache and the steel blue eyes of a soldier. ‘The trouble with crime is that it doesn’t give the women a chance. Look at Paul over there, discussing penal reform with all those dreary men. He’s neglecting his wife.’

  ‘Bless you,’ said Steve, giving him a kiss on his bristling cheek.

  The criticism was not altogether warranted. Paul was at the drinks table jostling among the journalists to get his glass refilled. He emerged eventually from the scrum and tottered across to the sofa.

  ‘Hello,’ said Paul. ‘You look like an oasis of sanity in this mad publishing world. Can I join you?’ He sat on the floor beside the sofa. ‘Oh dear. Crime is too serious a matter to be left to experts. Have you ever heard so much nonsense talked?’

  ‘Sir Graham,’ Steve explained, ‘has been regretting the absence of women from the ranks of crime. Down with male domination, that’s what we say.’

  Paul laughed. ‘I’ll drink to that. Dr Stern forgot to mention sexual differences, didn’t he?’ He looked triumphantly at Steve. ‘I knew the book wasn’t thorough! And poor old Scott is beginning to wish he’d never published it. He’s threatening to sack his non-fiction editor for committing the firm to a book about rats.’

  ‘Rats?’ Inspector Vosper repeated nervously.

  ‘Yes, Scott is losing his grip. He assumed that because there were graphs and footnotes it was a scholarly work.’

  ‘Paul,’ said his wife disloyally to the others, ‘is another of those people who think that psychology is bunk.’

  ‘That’s not true! But I am an arts man, and I think that detection is something to do with logic and understanding people, having intuition and predicting individual behaviour.’

  ‘Hard work and attention to detail,’ Inspector Vosper muttered audibly.

  ‘Detection?’ said Sir Graham. ‘But the book isn’t about detection, is it?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Steve.

  ‘Then what the devil are we doing here?’ Paul demanded indignantly. ‘Why did Scott ask me to bring along the cream of the British police force? I thought it was a handy manual on spotting crooks by the bumps on their heads. I wouldn’t have agreed to review it if I’d known.’

  ‘I suppose,’ the assistant commissioner said thoughtfully, ‘that we detectives understand crime, understand the psychology of crime if you like. But we don’t reach our understanding by experiments on rats, or by statistics. Charlie has understanding, but it’s not the kind of thing that can be described in a book. For instance, Charlie was telling me this evening of a case that he’s—’

  Inspector Vosper coughed and straightened his shoulders.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Sir Graham demanded. ‘I was going to tell Temple about those two boys—’

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s what I assumed. I wondered whether that would be discreet.’

  ‘Discreet?’ The military voice barked with exasperation. ‘Discretion is for inspectors, man! An assistant commissioner can be as indiscreet as he likes!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘If we were discreet we’d accept that no crime had been committed and get on with our work.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And don’t keep on saying yes, sir, like that. This is an informal occasion. Relax and look as though you’re enjoying the art of conversation. Sit down, man.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Vosper sat on a stiff-backed chair and tried to compose his stern features into a relaxed order. He was doing quite well until Steve began choking with laughter.

  ‘The point is that no crime has been committed,’ Sir Graham resumed. ‘At least, not that we know of. We’ve simply had a missing persons report, and that wouldn’t justify a full scale investigation. But Vosper thinks the situation should be looked into, and he’s usually right about these matters. A first class detective has a nose for anything not quite right.’

  ‘Really?’ said Paul with bland innocence. ‘Intuition, eh?’

  ‘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 w
as 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.’