The Spoilt Kill Read online

  One wet Monday afternoon a body is found in a closed tank of liquid clay at Shentall’s long-established pottery. Present at the irruption of this alien violence is Nicholson, a freelance detective engaged by Luke Shentall, head of the firm, to investigate the leakage of new designs to foreign imitators. Is the death connected with this case? Nicholson reviews what has passed, from his arrival to the gathering tension of the twenty-four hours before the crime. Introduced as the writer of the firm’s history, knowing that no scrap of talk or behaviour may be dismissed as irrelevant until after the event, he has watched the people with whom he is in daily contact. He gradually succumbs to the family spirit of Shentail’s, the interest of pottery, the unique atmosphere of the blackened Midland city; and to his feeling for the chief suspect, the designer Corinna Wakefield. For the police investigation that follows he is inevitably involved, more personally at each turn of events. And though he tries to stand aside he is driven, with bitterly divided mind, to use his knowledge and understanding to reveal what he knows will bring unhappiness to all of them.

  THE

  SPOILT

  KILL

  MARY KELLY

  London

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  The Spoilt Kill © 1961 by Mary Kelly

  Acknowledgement is due to Francis, Day & Hunter Ltd for permission to reprint the chorus of If Those Lips Could Only Speak!

  THE SPOILT KILL

  ONE

  What Happened

  I HAD been spying on Corinna for over two weeks; spying on her for pay. So when at half-past two she came out of the art room naturally I saw her, from my carefully chosen position, through the door of the library, which I always kept open, and naturally I got up and followed her; with the difference that after the events of the morning I no longer bothered to conceal that I was doing so.

  She walked as far as the cloakroom used by women staff, and half turned on the threshold.

  ‘Why don’t you come in?’ she asked, trying a sarcastic inflection that didn’t quite come off.

  Why not? I thought, and followed her. After all the place was only a cloakroom, literally, with a wash-basin and a rail for the women to hang their coats. No one was likely to come in at such a time, and if they did, Corinna wasn’t the one who had to worry about explaining her presence.

  The narrow window disclosed a section of the city of Stoke-on-Trent; a row of bottle kilns blocking the gap between blackened brick buildings, and beyond them a factory chimney and the peak of a slag heap, wraiths even in the middle distance. There was no far distance, only a grey blankness of cleaned smoke mixed with the drizzle that seeped from low-lying clouds.

  Corinna was letting soft tepid water from the drinking tap trickle into a mug. An earthenware mug, of course. There aren’t many plastic mugs in Stoke, at least in public places; not even plastic cruets in canteens; always pottery.

  She took a small tube from her handbag and shook out a couple of tablets.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, too quickly. It was stupid of me. My mind, set on edge by the crackling tensions of the morning’s work, had taken a melodramatic leap. All the same, I wanted to be sure.

  Without a change of expression she held out the tube, a commercial aspirin-codeine compound.

  ‘Headache?’ I asked.

  She looked at me sullenly. ‘My insides enjoying their revenge, that’s all. Something you never have to take into account.’

  There’s no answer to that, their ultimate weapon for beating you down as a lout. ‘Revenge?’ I said. ‘On what?’

  ‘Barrenness. They make you pay for the waste, whether it’s your fault or not.’

  She put the tablets in her mouth and swallowed them with a gulp of water. I hoped for her sake that they would work quickly. Showing visitors round the works was a .long, tiring business; and it was hard on her, one way and another that she should have to do it today. But there, it was her turn, and she accepted without question that she would go on as usual, in spite of everything.

  She straightened the collar of her blouse. ‘Be useful, since you’re here,’ she said. ‘Is my back tidy?’

  There was one loose hair on her shoulders. It was long and shining – she didn’t pay the hairdresser a small fortune for nothing; might have been fair or grey, an ambiguity which presumably accounts for the description ash blonde; and hung limply from my fingers; the spring of youth had left it. I looked at the white face reflected in the mirror, at the lines which today were so marked. She was lucky, at thirty-five, that they were still individually distinguishable. But then, she’d had no children, she’d known only the second-best pain.

  In the mirror our eyes met, and turned quickly away. She pressed her hands against the front of her skirt.

  ‘I must have a drink,’ she muttered. ‘Just a swig, not enough to kick against the tablets. Otherwise I can’t face the afternoon. Visitors!’ She shot a sour look out of the window at the kilns and the leaden sky. ‘You’d think the place was a spa, the way they come.’

  She went to the coat rail, shoved back the hangers and put her hand in the pockets of her suede jacket, for her flask; then in the other pocket.

  ‘Left it at home?’ I asked.

  She stood still for a moment, with her back to me; then turned round and without answering went out of the door. I followed. She said nothing, merely glancing at her watch as we walked along the corridor to the showroom.

  The visitors were there already, stepping nervously on the polished wooden floor, making unnaturally wide turns round the comers of tables and cases, with their elbows tucked into their sides. They looked more or less the same as last week’s batch; quiet, well dressed, more women than men in the group, and this time no children, for which Corinna would be thankful; their curiosity and instinct to touch must have added to the strain of showing round. Half the visitors would be strangers to Stoke who had come to the city primarily to see the other half; their relations or friends; and quite properly the first and most important part of their entertainment was to be shown round a pottery. I counted them. They were all there. Shentall’s don’t permit more than ten to a party; and that’s quite enough to be let loose among their fragile ware.

  We walked in together, through the luminous display of bone china, milky white with pastel flowers for middle-class wedding presents, crimson and gilt for city banqueting services, pink brown and green prints for the North American market. At all of it the visitors smiled with unwinking approbation.

  Miss Ashe the curator came forward. ‘Oh, Mrs Wakefield, there you are.’ She turned from Corinna to me. ‘I wonder if you’d mind if we looked in at the library, Mr Nicholson? I wouldn’t have disturbed you if you’d been working there, but perhaps you could give us just a few minutes—’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘as long as you like.’

  She thanked me, collected the visitors, and led them through the door into the library. Corinna went with them. I hesitated; but I couldn’t bring myself to inflict on her in front of Miss Ashe the humiliation of my tagging presence. I suppose I might have listened to the official commentary on the portraits and photographs that hung round the walls. Matthew Shentall, master potter, who founded the firm in 1788. His son and successor James. James’s partner, Edward Hope. William Shentall. Henry Shentall. The late James John Shentall. Mr Luke Shentall, the present head of the family and firm. But I knew them by heart and I could make my own comments.

  I went downstairs to wait, wondering whether the visitors had admired the hall as much as I had when I arrived, whether they’d been as charmed by their reception. The oiled oak walls hung with blue and white plates were no more than an adequate setting; the jewel was in the lighted cubicle: Judith, sweet apple dumpling Judith, the receptionist, the girl at the switchbo
ard.

  I couldn’t see her. I walked across and put my head through the open window marked Enquiries. She wasn’t there. On the desk by the switchboard lay a small white lace-trimmed handkerchief crumpled into a ball. Judith, Judith! Suppose Mr Luke had a call from Tiffany’s? But it was none of my business.

  After a few minutes the visitors came down. I stood back in the angle of the stairs till they had all gone through the door, then walked after them into the yard. The air was soft and close, and the fine drizzle seemed rather to float than to fall. Clay-whitened water lay like milk between the cobbles over which the visitors picked their way, past the line of parked cars, acid bright against the smoky wall.

  ‘Are those kilns still used?’ a woman asked timidly.

  She meant the two black brick bottle ovens partly embedded in the side of the building.

  ‘No, those are preserved, for the time being, as souvenirs and for storage space,’ Corinna explained. ‘We have gas-fired tunnel kilns now, you’ll see them later. There’s very little coal firing left in the industry, and even that will be gone in a few years.’

  One of the men in the party murmured something about the Clean Air Act. As she turned to agree with him and, perhaps, to enlarge on the subject, she caught sight of me standing on the fringe of the group. She flushed, and without discussing the Clean Air Act, walked on to the clay bank.

  ‘This is the raw material,’ she said. ‘China clay, ball clay, Cornish stone—’

  A chorus of exclamation cut her short. I remembered being surprised myself by those grey and mud-coloured heaps lying on the ground in wooden pens, like sheep.

  ‘Doesn’t it get dirty?’ someone asked.

  Corinna could barely fetch the required smile. Anyway, I thought, half-hearing her explanations, it is dirt, isn’t it? Earth of a sort. Decomposed felspar. Can dirt get dirty? Or dirtier?

  ‘But what about the rain?’ said a visitor.

  ‘Weathering is good for it,’ Corinna answered shortly.

  I knew why she was short. She was suffering agonies of embarrassment because I was there, watching and listening, making her feel like a schoolgirl at an oral exam. Perhaps she believed that, like an examiner, I was quite at ease, even enjoying myself. I couldn’t tell her that I wasn’t. There was nothing either of us could do to help the other.

  She went on mechanically rolling off the usual information.

  ‘This is the slip house,’ she said, ‘where the process of manufacture starts. In fact this is the earthenware slip house, but it’s much the same for china. First the crushed clay is mixed with water, in specified proportions, in what’s known as a blunger. The resulting liquid is called slip. This is passed through a fine mesh which retains any coarse impurities or grits that may have persisted so far, then over a magnetic screen which draws out minute iron particles. If these were left they’d appear as dark brown spots on the finished ware. Next the slip goes into a filter press to have surplus water squeezed out, then through a machine called a pug mill, where it’s sliced, chopped, and pressed in order to have removed as much air as possible. That’s to reduce the shrinkage during firing to the minimum. And when it’s pushed out by the pug, and sliced into conveniently sized lumps, the clay’s ready for shaping.’

  Inside the slip house it was cool and wet, and quiet except for the soft throb of the machinery and the whistling of two men shifting the great dripping concertina of the filter press. There was a smell of damp earth, such as you get in a deep cellar or a dungeon.

  Corinna stepped forward to point out the machines she’d mentioned; the blungers, which were shown only from a distance, the screens, the press. The pug, with its thick extruding pipe of clay, claimed as usual most attention. Analists, the whole pack. Corinna left them to stare for a moment, and came across to me.

  ‘Are you going to carry on with this farce through the entire tour of the works?’ she asked in a low voice.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ I said, ‘and I think the word farce was ill-chosen.’

  The grey eyes, so apt for tragedy, looked steadily up at me. ‘You can’t trust me, can you?’ she said.

  That wasn’t strictly true; it was rather that while I was paid I mustn’t trust her. But I said nothing; and saw at once that almost any words, however hard, would have been easier for her to discount than that silence. She held her lower lip with her teeth, and her eyes grew red and sticky. I thought with consternation of the visitors, even glanced for a moment at the idea of taking over the tour myself.

  She walked away, half a dozen steps across the floor of the slip house, as if to put a little distance between herself and the rest, to give her a breathing space. She stood with her back to the men working the press, struggling for control of her face. And then – I don’t know what made her do it. Why did she do it? She bent down and lifted the trap door off the ark.

  The ark isn’t shown to visitors; not for reasons of secrecy, but because it isn’t particularly interesting. It’s a cylindrical brick-lined vault, about eight feet deep, in which the slip is stored till it’s needed in the press. Two gently rotating paddles keep the clay particles in perfect suspension.

  I glanced at the visitors, to make sure they were still engrossed by the pug, then back at Corinna.

  Alarm gave my insides a wrench. Something was wrong. Her face, staring down at the ark, had the stupid owlish look of wits scattered to nothing that follows a shock. There were three steps to her side. I took hold of her elbow, and looked into the ark, which was less than half full. There was something—

  A body. Christ, Saviour! there was a body sprawled over one of the paddles, a body, partly held by the junction of the paddle with the shaft. The grey-white slip had splashed and soaked its clothes, coated its hand, run over the tongue in the open mouth, over the eyeballs, the face, the hair, the whole down-dropped head. No room for doubt; it was a dead body, lying like a statue fallen and crooked, a blind, grey slimy statue slowly turning round and round. But it was a body.

  Reaction came, half a minute late, my heart knocking and leaping inside me, a hard hot lump bursting to get out. Corinna’s arm began to shake as if she were holding a drill. Quickly I bent down and lowered the lid of the ark. Then I took hold of her, one hand on her back, the other behind her head, and pressed her face against me.

  ‘Sh! don’t make a fuss,’ I whispered. The silly insults one offers in moments of panic. She wasn’t the screaming sort. She was going to faint, I felt her sway. With one furious second of prayer for a steady voice – I, the agnostic, old habits die hard – I called to the men at the press.

  ‘Arthur, take the visitors next door and ask them if they’d mind waiting a minute. Mrs Wakefield’s ill. They can watch the cups being jollied. Run up to Miss Ashe and ask her to carry on the tour from there. Harry, here a minute. Get the paddles of the ark stopped. Then find Mr Luke and whatever he’s doing tell him to come down. Tell him it’s urgent. There’s been an accident.’

  I shifted my grip on her without letting go. ‘Come on, Corinna,’ I said quietly, ‘just as far as the wall, then you can sit down.’

  She managed to walk, leaning on me, with her head bent as if she were watching our feet crossing the clayey floor. There was a box of some sort pushed against the wall. I sat her on that, keeping my hand on her shoulder. She leaned her head on the wall and closed her eyes.

  One of the men came across from the pug. ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘what’s the trouble?’

  Lamely I repeated that she felt ill; a half truth, an excuse, to keep things calm for as long as possible, like the word accident. Accident? Not a hope, not a chance. The man from the pug had the only word for what was happening, what was about to happen. Trouble. Trouble, linked with Corinna from the start. The paint shop, the library, the slip house, the art room, Etruria, Dovedale, Endon, the party; this was the culmination of their half-grasped tensions. Death. A body, which, in spite of its slimy mask, I’d had time to recognise.

  Trouble. A sea of troubles, in which, i
n my shock, I felt I was drowning. And like a drowning man, with some things clear, some gone, all at a fevered distance, I remembered.

  TWO

  What Happened Before

  THE first words Corinna spoke to me alone, standing outside Mr Luke’s office, looking perplexed that she, and not another man, had been asked to take charge of me; spoken not with the local accent, not with any special accent, just accepted Standard English in a low-pitched voice that could have come from anywhere between Tyne and Avon.

  ‘I want to comb my hair. Perhaps you’d wait in the hall.’

  I didn’t mind. It gave me a chance to take a good look at the reception desk, or rather at the girl, who had already impressed me. She sat by the switchboard seriously adding up a column of figures. Her head was bent over the paper, she bit the end of a pencil – perhaps she found the arithmetic difficult – and the light in her cubicle shone down on the neat bun of fair hair and the pale yellow cardigan. A nice girl. Pretty in a quiet way, plump rather than slim, with downy skin and a winning smile that went well with the soft Staffordshire speech with which she welcomed you. The quintessence of good, simple, amiable, well-brought-up girl.

  I heard Corinna coming down the stairs, and had time to turn my eyes to one of the plates hung on the walls; a blue and white landscape of trees and ruins.

  ‘Is this Shentall’s?’

  ‘We wouldn’t hang up another firm’s ware. That’s old stuff, about 1850. They were trying to nick Spode’s market. Do you like it?’

  ‘Not much, in itself, but it looks well against the wood.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, glancing at the Enquiries desk with a half smile, ‘it finishes the picture. If you’re ready we’ll go over to the canteen before the crowd comes.’

  We sat down at our table as the one o’clock hooter sounded for lunch; and through the open tops of the windows the signals of other factories, other potteries, blew their different notes in the next thirty seconds, according to the sharpness of their clocks; a noise like a ragged wood wind chord that breaks four times daily from industrial cities.