Paul Temple and the Curzon Case. Francis Durbridge
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 The colour had been replaced by commercialism, it was no longer crime and vice for the simple pleasure of it.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.’
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