The Murder Room Read Online Free PDF

Violette Kaye. This was the second Brighton trunk murder. The first body, a woman without head and legs, had been found at Brighton railway station eleven days earlier. No one was ever arrested for that crime. Mancini was tried at Lewes Assize Court in December and brilliantly defended by Norman Birkett. Birkett saved his life. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty, but in 1976 Mancini confessed. This trunk seems to exert a morbid fascination on visitors.”
    It held no fascination for Dalgliesh. Suddenly he felt the need to look at the outside world and walked over to one of the two easterly windows. Below, set among saplings, was a wooden garage and, within eight yards, a small garden shed with a water tap. The boy he had seen in the drive was washing his hands and then rubbing them dry on the side of his trousers. He was recalled to the room by Ackroyd, anxious to demonstrate his last case.
    Leading Dalgliesh to the second of the display cabinets, he said, “The Blazing Car Murder, 1930. This is certainly a candidate for my article. You must have heard of it. Alfred Arthur Rouse, a thirty-seven-year-old commercial traveller living in London, was a compulsive womanizer. Apart from committing bigamy, he is supposed to have seduced some eighty women during the course of his travels. He needed to disappear permanently, preferably to be thought dead, so on sixth November he picked up a tramp and on a lonely road in Northamptonshire killed him, threw petrol over him, set the car alight and made off. Unfortunately for him, two young men walking home to their local village saw him and asked him about the blaze. He went on his way, calling out, ‘It looks as though someone is having a bonfire.’ That encounter helped to get him arrested. If he’d hidden in the ditch and let them go by he might have got away with it.”
    Dalgliesh said, “And what makes it specific to its age?”
    â€œRouse had served in the war and was badly injured in the head. His behaviour at the scene and at the trial was exceptionally stupid. I see Rouse as a casualty of the First World War.”
    He might well have been, thought Dalgliesh. Certainly his behaviour after the murder and his extraordinary arrogance in the witness-box had done more than the prosecuting counsel to put the rope around his neck. It would have been interesting to know the extent of his war service and how he had been wounded. Few men who had served long in Flanders could have returned home completely normal.
    He left Ackroyd to his researches and went in search of the library. It was on the west side of the same floor, a long room with two windows facing the car-park and a third overlooking the drive. The walls were lined with mahogany bookcases with three jutting bays and there was a long rectangular table in the middle of the room. At a smaller table near the window there was a photocopying machine with a notice saying that copies were ten pence per sheet. Beside it sat an elderly woman writing labels for exhibits. The room wasn’t cold but she wore a muffler and mittens. As Dalgliesh entered, she said in a mellifluous, educated voice, “Some of the glass cabinets are locked but I have the key if you want to handle the books. Copies of
The Times
and other newspapers are in the basement.”
    Dalgliesh had some difficulty in knowing how to reply. With the picture gallery still to see, he had no time to examine the books at leisure, but he didn’t wish his visit to seem peremptory, the mere indulgence of a whim. He said, “It’s my first visit so I’m just making a preliminary tour. But thank you.”
    He walked slowly along the bookcases. Here, the majority in first editions, were the major novelists of the inter-war years and some whose names were unknown to him. The obvious names were represented: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Wyndham Lewis, Rosamond Lehmann, a roll-call of