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PHILIP LORAINE
Crackpot
COPYRIGHT
HarperFiction
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1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 1993 by The Crime Club
Copyright © Philip Loraine 1993
Philip Loraine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780002324366
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2017 ISBN: 9780008252748
Version: 2017-03-29
Crackpot
In the opening paragraph of Philip Loraine’s novel a murderer describes the process of picking up an unknown girl in a club prior to strangling her, and admits to disposing of nine others in a similar manner. The murderer then returns to Crestcote House, a gothic mansion which has been turned into a peaceful retreat for ‘artists of recognized stature’.
The community comprises an eccentric composer, a reclusive iron-worker, a beautiful sculptress, a discontented novelist, and three assorted painters, one female, two male. The lord of this remarkable manor is a philanderer, and the place is known locally (and not surprisingly) as Crackpot Castle. No one suspects, however, that one of the denizens is a serial killer.
And no one need ever have suspected if the killer had not elected to play a practical joke on fellow residents which led to a spate of lies, an unsuccessful blackmail attempt—and another killing.
This time Chief Inspector Tom Pennard is very much on the scene. Under his questioning suspicion flickers like a will-o’-the-wisp from one person to the next, while all the time the murderer, anonymous and supposedly secure, offers the reader a first-hand commentary on the unfolding of events, leading to a dramatic unmasking in the final paragraphs of this cunningly plotted story.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Other Books By
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
Before I actually kill I seem to experience tunnel-vision, my whole being concentrated on the search and its inevitable conclusion. Although I don’t care for the idea, I suppose I’m like a junkie aiming for the next fix, and certainly what I do is addictive; but at least it doesn’t leave me a snot-dribbling half-human who will only move again when the desire for more becomes unendurable. Like certain drugs, killing enlarges and revitalizes me, enables me to work twice as well and twice as hard, but the period between my fixes is mercifully a long one—I seldom kill more than once a year.
As for the danger of being caught, it seems that I must take reasonable precautions because I never have been caught, nor, as far as I know, come within a mile of it. I’m not aware of these precautions, any more than a hunting animal is aware of the necessity for slow and cautious movement as it approaches its prey.
Take tonight. I found the name of the bar in Time Out, always a useful source of information. I’d never been to it before, and it was in a part of London, Battersea, which I hardly ever visit. It was called Lucky’s which amused me. As always, I found myself walking up and down the streets on either side of it. Planning? I don’t know, I’m not conscious of that part of my mind, it works as a separate entity, doing its own job and reporting what it feels. Sometimes the report is negative; I don’t inquire into the reasons, there’s no point. I simply take another look at Time Out and choose another place. Tonight the report was positive.
So I went into Lucky’s, paying an exorbitant ‘membership fee’. This didn’t worry me because I saw the girl as soon as I entered the large dimly-lit room, not for once rocking with the mindless racket of disco but with the comparatively subtle rhythm of the Charleston. The place, what one could see of it, was decorated to match in a vaguely 20’s style. But I only noticed this later; my eyes were initially blind to everything except the girl, or rather to her long neck caught by a random spotlight.
It was a beautiful neck, though she herself was no beauty, and she’d made the most of it, wearing low-cut black, wearing her dark hair in a short bob, so that really all there was to see of her was the white neck shining in darkness. The attraction was instant—but not sexual.
(I should explain here that the act of killing gives me no erotic pleasure, even if it’s an experience of stomach-churning excitement: to my mind more exciting, and far more satisfying, than sex can ever be; and I must admit that I find it disgusting, and unbelievable, that some killers achieve orgasm at the moment of death. Or is that pure hypocrisy on my part?)
The only thing that entered my mind when I saw this girl sitting at the bar, semi-spotlight, was the neck and the idea of getting my hands on it. Lucky’s!
I approached her straight away, I never waste time. It’s odd how some kinds of mutual recognition are instant, and of course this can be subconsciously intensified by the strange magnetism which seems to exist between killer and victim. There was the usual chit-chat but I have no idea what it was about. My guardian-mind seemed to approve of the fact that she too had never been to the place before. Her name was Pam; I forget what I called myself. Obviously she’d come out looking for sex, and obviously she found me attractive, I can usually rely on that; but there’s a danger in moving too quickly, a fact of which the hunting animal is always aware; as for the matter of recognition, I wasn’t worried by it; Lucky’s wasn’t the kind of club where I was likely to meet anyone I knew; all the same, I kept to shadow, letting Pam have the spotlight which I think she enjoyed.
She was a secretary (she probably said P.A.—all secretaries like to call themselves P.A.’s); in her late twenties which is a good age; they consider themselves experienced by then, thoroughly streetwise, and also feel a sense of life and youth slipping by too quickly.
As always I eventually said, ‘I live just around the corner, how about it?’ By then, under cover of the crush against the bar—on a Friday the place was packed—we’d progressed from the initial leg contact to more explicit fumbling, and she was evidently quite keen to proceed to the next stage.
During our preliminary stroll, my alter ego had taken note of a kind of mews about three hundred yards from the club, and now it led us there. Nobody was about. Piles of rubbish, stacked for the dustmen indicated that most of the doorways must have been delivery access to shops on the parallel main street. I chose one which might conceivably have led to living accommodation and gestured her to go ahead: it’s essential to have them in front of you. As soon as she stepped into shadow, I pulled on my gloves (nylon: leather sometimes tears quite easily), came up close behind her, put both hands around that long neck and jerked her backwards, off-balance. Nobody in such a position can kick out at you, their weight is wrongly distributed; the most they can do is claw at one’s hands.
As a matter of fact the girl’s fingers were unusually strong, but on the whole she was little trouble, taken so much by surprise, and so swiftly, that terror and lack of oxygen were at work on her before she’d barely reacted at all. A minute later she was no longer able to react. Two minutes later she was dead, but I gave her another minute just to be sure. I allowed her to sag on to the ground; took the precaution of feeling for a non-existent pulse; then picked up a flattened pile of cartons, neatly tied for the dustmen, and put them on top of her. When I glanced back from the still empty street she was indistinguishable from the rest of the rubbish discarded there.
I felt, as I walked away, an enormous, godlike sense of power. This fades quite quickly, leaving me in a state of electric excitement which will last for weeks, months. Now, as the train grinds and squeals over the points outside Waterloo Station, carrying me back to peaceful Crestcote, I wonder all over again what it is that motivates me. I think it must be the sense of danger, which is contradictory since I feel no sense of danger. Yet if you think of it, I’m defying the whole of society, riding roughshod over all its decencies and legalities; I’m in the process of destroying the barricades with which society imagines it can protect itself from the screaming disorder and cruelty of the real world.
Yes, I feel more real than any of the quiet citizens behind these lighted windows outside the train. Is my next victim lying in that bedroom, perhaps reading some sensational thriller about a psychopath? Are the parents of the girl I killed tonight watching television behind that pair of neatly drawn curtains, as yet unaware of the shock which is creeping up on them?
These thoughts arouse no sense of guilt, but that doesn’t make me ‘abnormal’ as the people out there in suburbia would no doubt consider me. I know what the real world is like and they don’t. I’m a part of the real world, the one they saw on the television news not so long ago: saw but did not see: terrorism, war, riot, famine … murder. I’m not suffering delusions of grandeur; there is no grandeur in the real world, not as far as humankind is concerned; we merely deceive ourselves, hiding behind the magnificence of Nature, knowing that we have no part in it.
I slept for half an hour, as I always do, and awoke newly invigorated, newly alive, fifteen minutes before the train pulled in to our small station. I never get out right away, waiting to see if any of my colleagues have been travelling with me. None.
Driving the last nine miles through a fresh and gusty autumn night, leaves whirling in the headlights, I find myself wondering, all over again, whether I’m a fool not to settle down with a suitable girl. This is another reaction which I know well, and of course it’s a delusion. Nothing, and certainly no suitable girl, will ever repress that urge to kill when it overcomes me.
And so through the village of Crestcote St Michael and up the hill, turning into the beautiful curving drive; and there, its absurd tower dominating the skyline against dark folds of down and woodland, lies Crackpot Castle itself, two or three lighted windows still glowing, even this late. We’re an odd lot, we keep odd hours.
CHAPTER 2
The tower of Crestcote House—crenellated, with a pepper-pot turret at one corner—was the crowning extravagance of the East Wing, brainchild of Hector Drummond-Fitch, 1802-1889, who had designed it himself. But not as a wing, oh no! In his opinion, in the opinion of his time, the original manor was nothing but a Jacobean farmhouse; he designated it the ‘South Wing’ and built his addition in a vaguely Gothic style to take its place, complete with baronial hall, drawing-room, library and some fourteen bedrooms. This now became Crestcote; the old building housed servants and a few unimportant guests. But during the years after his death the compass of architectural taste had swung back towards the South; his grandiose conception, tower, baronial hall and the rest of it, became the East Wing, a curiosity, and the beautiful old house reclaimed its original title and importance.
The great-great-grandson of this same Hector had fallen off his horse in such a disastrous manner that he’d been unable to sire any children. Eschewing various collaterals who didn’t please him, he left Crestcote, in toto, to his wife, who hated the house only a little less than she hated the English climate. Before departing for Antibes she willed the whole place to a niece, Sarah, already married to a gentleman-farmer, Oliver Langdale. But the money which accompanied the estate was not, in days of inflation, enough; and although Oliver made full use of its many acres for farming, lumber and horse-breeding, most of the house lay empty and useless. Also Sarah grew bored, after bearing three children.
‘Farmers’ wives,’ said her husband, a handsome block of good old county oak, ‘usually do garden produce and eggs, that sort of thing.’ Sarah had different ideas. Long ago, in her mid-twenties, she’d realized that her own artistic talent was an illusion (a few paintings survived to prove how right she’d been), but she still longed for the company of artists. Livestock and bloodstock were not, to her, limitless subjects of conversation.
After a certain amount of careful conversion, paid for out of her aunt’s money, she was presently able to insert a discreet advertisement in one or two of the right publications. Original apartments and studios were, it seemed, now available in and around a remote country house on the Wiltshire-Dorset borders and would be let only to ‘artists of recognized stature’. Peace was assured; rents would not be low but were negotiable; the main line station was nine miles away—Waterloo 1 hr. 40 mins. Oliver Langdale maintained that his wife was around the bend; he presumably foresaw a group of freaky, unwashed, stoned youngsters who would foul up the house and get in the way of his tractors, his horses and their grooms. Sarah told him not to be silly; hadn’t she specified ‘artists of recognized stature’? And why, he asked, would that kind of artist want to live in a commune?
‘It isn’t a commune,’ said Sarah, ‘it’s a community. And they’ll want to live here because creative people fundamentally need security. They’ll come, you see if they don’t.’
And come they did.
Johnny Ash, the well-known ‘East End’ painter, had been the first to settle in, and might well have left almost immediately (like many Londoners he didn’t like the country and was indeed afraid of it); but then he’d met young Rosamund Turner, and since his foremost wish was to keep her away from London, for excellent reasons, he had changed his mind and stayed. His studio was in the tower at the north end of the Victorian Wing, and thus commanded the best light, as well as staggering views to north and east—which was yet another reason for the jealousy of his neighbour, another painter, Ben Elliston. Between these two and the old house lived Lisa MacDonnell, the sculptress. Whether or not this beautiful and recently divorced young woman needed the security of Crestcote, she’d have had to go a long way to find a better studio than her ex-coach-house in the stable-yard: also ideal for the delivery of stone or marble.
The stables themselves were huge: so large that not even Oliver Langdale minded sacrificing a chunk of them to make two more dwellings, one occupied by Laurence Otterey, the writer, and the other by Vicky Lind whose wild-life paintings, much reproduced, were known worldwide. The Lodge was rented by Edvard Kusnik, composer: well removed from the main house so that his pianos, synthesizers and massive stereo-system disturbed nobody. The same went for Harold Newson who worked in iron, producing a din which was every bit as loud but (some of his colleagues claimed) a lot more musical than Edvard’s compositions. He had chosen his own workshop, an abandoned cottage on the far side of the walled kitchen garden. Part of the ceiling had collapsed, giving him the height he often needed. It had never been Sarah Langdale’s intention that anyone should inhabit this shack, but when Harold moved his single suitcase and his sleeping-bag into what remained of the upper floor, she hastened to make it passably habitable: not that rain and wind seemed to worry the ironworker in the very least.
Of course the Lord of the Manor’s fears regarding these, to his mind, odd customers were quite unfounded. Indeed, he had to admit that his wife’s ‘community’ not only made use of the place and brought it to life, not only paid well, thus taking care of many estate expenses, but also gave Crestcote an interesting cachet in county circles. Most of the county had heard of Johnny Ash and Lisa MacDonnell, and all of them knew the lovely work of that clever Vicky Lind: those lifelike badgers and hedgehogs, foxes and owls, not to mention the minutely realistic flora among which her fauna reposed.
Needless to say, none of the other artists considered Vicky Lind to be an artist at all, pairing her with Johnny Ash’s Rosamund; but whereas Rosamund admitted that she was only ‘an arts and crafts kind of person’, Madame Lind affected airs and was thought by all to be a stuck-up bitch.
A certain confusion surrounded the exact standing of Harold Newson. Could an iron-worker properly be called an ‘artist’? Harold himself, tall and sinewy with a long Scandinavian face and almost white fair hair, didn’t care what he was called. He kept himself to himself, living in flurries of fire, black-faced, like some mythic figure from a Norse folk-tale. Newson—Cnutson. Harold, son of Canute: and he looked it!
When it became known that he’d been commissioned to design and make a pair of gates for Westminster Abbey the doubts about his artistic status faded away, and he was accepted as a fully paid-up member of the creative (and self-evidently snobbish) community: though Oliver Langdale persisted in calling him ‘the farrier’, but not to his face.
As will become all too apparent, there were quite a number of such mockeries, rivalries, and even hatreds, festering beneath the calm of Crackpot Castle: a nickname invented by some village wit in Crestcote St Michael and gleefully adopted by the inmates themselves.
On this brisk sunny autumn morning the denizens of Crestcote House were going, industriously or sluggishly, about their everyday occupations, naturally unaware of the fact that even these were soon to undergo peculiar changes, as if some malicious fairy had touched them with her wand, and that the beautiful day would soon become emotionally overcast.
In the tower-studio, Rosamund Turner—fair, blue-eyed, with a fresh young beauty only slightly smudged by the assaults of life—was sitting upright on the bed, naked, stitching deftly at a sampler: Honoria Temple 1832. Johnny Ash, who always collapsed after sex, turned his head and watched her; he would presently do some preliminary sketches for yet another portrait, he never tired of painting her. He was thirty-five, not tall, but dark, wiry, good-looking in a gipsyish way. He was also inclined to be jealous, but had been forced by life with Rosamund to see what a selfish and self-defeating emotion it was.
She herself was so popular with everyone at Crestcote that it would have taken an excessively churlish man, which he was not, to complain on that account. Indeed, he now felt quite proud of the fact that even Ben Elliston, who would barely speak to him, was always overjoyed to talk to her; and she was surely the only resident of the place who could rely on a warm welcome at Harold Newson’s forge.
Gently mocking, he said, ‘Honoria Temple 1832, my arse! Who’s going to believe that?’
‘You’d be surprised.’ This was another of the reasons he loved her: she was a bit of a con.
The sampler had been commissioned by an ‘antique’ dealer in London. When it was finished, she’d bleach it a very little to fade the colours, put it in one of her large collection of old frames and take it, with three others already finished, to his shop in Marylebone. Not looking up she asked, ‘What happened in Bristol yesterday?’
‘They’d like to do a show all right.’
‘But?’
‘I don’t know, I wasn’t too impressed. Who needs a half-cock provincial show?’
‘You were awfully late back.’
‘Yes. I got boozing. I hoped I hadn’t woken you.’
‘You didn’t, not really.’ In fact she knew that he was lying; if he’d been boozing she’d have smelt the alcohol on his breath as soon as he climbed into bed. That meant he’d gone to London, there were fast trains from Bristol. How she wished he’d admit to these periodical visits and their purpose, but he wouldn’t, and so they’d become an un-spoken secret between them. (At least no woman was involved, she wouldn’t have stood for that.) She guessed what it was all about, and so guessed that it had the power to hurt him; and she would never, never hurt him, she loved him too much. Also she owed so much to him—her life, for God’s sake. If he hadn’t met her, stoned, at that party and dragged her down to Wiltshire she would certainly be dead of Aids by now; it could only have been a matter of time before she progressed to heroin and the contaminated needle.
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