Root of All Evil Read online

  Root of All Evil

  E. X. Ferrars

  FELONY & MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Dedication

  Dead Men Don’t Ski

  Copyright

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  ii

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  Guide

  Cover

  Title

  Contents

  Start of Content

  Dedication

  Dead Men Don’t Ski

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  “Andrew?” the voice on the telephone said. “This is Felicity.”

  Felicity. Surely a voice from the dead.

  “Yes?” Andrew Basnett said confusedly.

  “Felicity Silvester.” The voice was sharper.

  “Oh yes, of course, Felicity,” Andrew said. “I’m sorry, the telephone woke me out of a nap. I was muddled for a moment.”

  “What are you doing, having a nap at your age at this time of day?” the voice asked.

  “I’m seventy, Felicity.”

  “A mere child. I’m eighty-five.”

  “And how are you?”

  “Better than you might expect. Still reasonably mobile and suffering only occasionally from attacks of senility.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it.”

  “Andrew, it’s a very long time since we last saw each other.”

  “Yes, it’s a very long time. Four years, is it? Five years?”

  “Don’t bother trying to tot it up. What’s a year or two here or there at my age? I saw you at poor Nell’s funeral and that’s ten years ago and you’ve been down to visit me once or twice since then. But now I’d like to see you again, Andrew. I’ve reached an age when I want to see all my really old friends at least once more. Suppose you come and spend Easter with me.”

  Felicity Silvester had never really been a friend of Andrew’s. She was a cousin of Nell’s, Andrew’s wife, who had died ten years ago of cancer. Nell, so Andrew had believed, had never been particularly fond of Felicity, but she had had a great capacity for loyalty to her numerous relations, and if Nell would have thought that Andrew should spend Easter with Felicity, he was prepared to do so.

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s a most attractive suggestion. But won’t it be rather a lot of trouble for you? Suppose I come just for the day.”

  “It’s no trouble at all,” Felicity replied. “I’ve still got my wonderful Mrs. Cavell, who manages everything for me, and I’ve blossomed out recently into a manservant. You remember Agnes Cavell, of course.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” Andrew said.

  “No, come to think of it, she may have come to me since your last visit. And that dates it, because Agnes has been with me for four years. I know that, because we were talking about it only the other day. So it must be nearly five years since we’ve seen each other. Well, you’ll come for Easter, won’t you, Andrew?”

  “Yes, thank you very much, Felicity.”

  “Come on Thursday. You don’t want to travel on Good Friday—there aren’t any trains to speak of. Come in the morning. There’s a good train that gets here about twelve thirty-five. Then take a taxi. I won’t send Laycock to meet you with the car, because you and he won’t know each other. Laycock’s the manservant I mentioned. Don’t you think there’s something rather grand about having a manservant these days?”

  “Very grand,” Andrew said.

  “I wish I could call him my butler. I’ve always wanted to have a butler. My grandfather had one when I was a child, and I adored him. I liked him ever so much better than my grandfather. But Laycock just wouldn’t shape up to it, though he does his best. Well, I’ll expect you on Thursday about one o’clock. I’m
so glad you’re coming. Of course Derek and Frances will be here and for once the children too, so you won’t have to put up with too much of me. Good-bye, Andrew.”

  “Good-bye, Felicity. Thank you so much for asking me.”

  Putting the telephone down, Andrew wondered who on earth Derek and Frances were and to whom the children mentioned by Felicity belonged. Faintly the names Derek and Frances rang a bell. He thought that perhaps if they were relations of Nell’s, she might have spoken of them at some time. But unfortunately the names did not evoke any memory of faces to go with them. Not that that meant so very much. His memory, he was only too well aware, was deteriorating rapidly.

  That did not apply to the events of his youth. He had astonishingly vivid recollections of his childhood. Yet the face and the name of someone whom he had met only a week before might be wiped clean from his memory almost in minutes. He would have been the worst possible sort of witness at a trial, he had often thought. He might actually have watched a murder being committed and afterwards would have been unable to say whether the murderer had been tall or short, dark or fair, well-dressed or in dirty jeans. Even books that he had read only two or three weeks ago and in which he had been really interested soon faded into a grey blur unless he had made careful notes while he was reading.

  Notes. That reminded him...

  He had intended to spend the afternoon going over the notes that he had made yesterday in the library of the Royal Society in connection with the life that he was writing of Robert Hooke, the noted seventeenth-century natural philosopher, but instead he had fallen into the sleep from which Felicity’s telephone call had roused him. But now that he was fully awake he could get ahead with some work.

  A slight reluctance to do so kept him extended on the sofa for a little while, but taking a firm grip on himself, he got up and padded across the room in his socks to the desk where his papers were heaped up in what to anyone but himself would have been incomprehensible disorder. On his way he stumbled over a pair of slippers that were lying in the middle of the room. He very seldom wore slippers or shoes when he was alone in his flat in St. John’s Wood, but preferred to wander around in his socks, leaving the slippers lying wherever they had happened to fall when he kicked them off.

  As he went he declaimed:

  “When all the world is young, lad,

  And all the trees are green;

  And every goose a swan, lad,

  And every lass a queen...”

  Annoyed with himself, he tried to stop it, but even though he silenced his tongue, the words went relentlessly on in his head. He had been haunted by the verse all day. It was not that he was suffering from an attack of nostalgia for his own departed youth, but he had always been given to reciting to himself, aloud if there was no one else in the flat, and it happened that when he had been eleven or so and at the height of his powers for learning verse by heart, he had had a passion for Kingsley. He had also venerated Newbolt and Kipling, and as a result had had to endure a fair amount of torment on their account in later years. He had done his best to oust them by memorizing Shakespeare, Milton, Donne and others from whom he would have continued to derive genuine pleasure, but the impressions made by his early enthusiasms went too deep to be effaced and nearly always triumphed.

  “Then hey for boot and horse, lad,

  And round the world away...”

  Frowning, he sat down, drew towards him the papers he wanted and at last, as he lost himself in facts and figures, succeeded in banishing the tiresome jingle.

  He had been writing his book on Robert Hooke for three years. Sometimes he felt that there was strangely little to show for so many hours of work, spread over such a long time, but the truth was that as he went along he kept on tearing up almost as much as he wrote. At the back of his mind there lurked a fear that perhaps the book would never be finished. And perhaps the truth was that he did not really want to finish it, for it had kept him occupied in a reasonably contented way ever since his retirement and he did not know what he would do with himself once it was done.

  The first year after his retirement from the chair of Botany in one of London University’s many colleges he had spent going round the world, lecturing in the United States, New Zealand, Australia and India, and he had found that very enjoyable. But after his return home, life would have been very empty for him and the loneliness that he had felt ever since Nell’s death would have been intolerable if he had not committed himself to work of some sort.

  He did not look forward much to his visit to Felicity Silvester. He knew that she would make him comfortable. She was a rich woman and her home on the outskirts of the small town of Braden-on-Thames was luxurious. But as he remembered her, she had been an arrogant woman, charming and entertaining when she felt in the mood to be so, but difficult if she ever felt that her dominance was being challenged. Nell had always said of her that she was kind and generous and that the trouble with her was simply that when she was young she had been a great beauty and so had become accustomed, simply on account of it, to having her own way. She had been married to a husband twenty years older than herself, who had adored her and who had been what was to Andrew that most mysterious of mammals, something in the City. Whatever it was that James Silvester had done in the City, he had left his widow, when he died at the age of sixty-five, a considerable fortune. Andrew remembered that she had sent Nell and him a sumptuous wedding present of Georgian silver, and for a time, since she had been living in London then, they had seen a good deal of her. But after a few years she had moved to Braden-on-Thames, which was because...

  Ah yes. Andrew’s memory, as he sat looking at his notes, suddenly became active. She had moved to be near her son, Derek. Derek was a doctor in Braden-on-Thames and Frances was his wife. That was who they were. And Andrew had a vague belief that they had children, though how many of them there were or of what ages they might be now he had no idea. The thought of their presence did not add to the attractions of his visit. He had become very tired of the young in his last years of trying to teach them. Probably it had been his own fault, but it had come to seem to him that they all displayed a dreadful similarity to one another, and by degrees he had become convinced that real individuality, of the kind in which he could still feel interested, was to be found only in children under twenty months and in men and women over thirty.

  The Thursday morning on which he set off for Braden-on-Thames was April at its most cheerless, bleak and blustery, with only an occasional glint of blue showing itself half-heartedly through the hurrying clouds. He took a taxi to Paddington, arriving there as he always did at any station, anxious that he might miss his train, but in fact half an hour before it was due to leave. The platform from which it would leave was not even shown yet on the indicator. Going to the bookstall, he bought a copy of the Financial Times to read on the train, and it was as he was paying for it that he noticed the woman with the familiar face watching him.

  Not that he could be sure that she was actually watching him. Their eyes happened to meet for a moment, then she turned away and walked off along the platform. As soon as she had done that he could not be sure why he had felt that he knew her. As usual, when his memory let him down over such a matter, he felt guilty. Perhaps she had been a student of his and felt hurt now that he had not recognized her. Or perhaps she was someone whom he knew quite well, who would be thinking that he had been deliberately discourteous. But anyway, she was gone and after all, what did it matter? He strolled back to where he could see the indicator, saw that his train was now shown to be leaving from Platform 5, found that it was waiting there and that he could get into it, and passed through the barrier.

  Andrew was a tall man and if he took the trouble to stand erect was even taller than he looked, but in the last few years he had allowed himself to get into the habit of stooping. But he had kept his spare figure and still walked with some vigour, though he found that he grew tired now more rapidly than seemed to him reasonable. He had bony feature
s, short grey hair and grey eyes under eyebrows that had remained rather formidably dark. An intelligent face, but in recent years its expression had become more detached than it had been when he was young. His long sight was still good and he needed glasses only for reading. He was fumbling for these so that he could start reading his newspaper after settling himself in an almost empty second-class carriage, because although he could easily have afforded first class, that was one of the minor extravagances to which he had never been able to accustom himself, when he saw the woman with the familiar face looking at him.

  She was seated just across the gangway. She was about forty, a slender woman with a thin, pale face with a high-bridged nose, a small pouting mouth and large, slightly prominent dark eyes embedded in a quantity of make-up. Her hair was dark and cut fairly short and she was wearing big, brassy-looking earrings. Her overcoat was scarlet with a collar of black fur. She had a woman’s magazine open before her and had been looking over the top of it when Andrew’s eyes met hers, but as soon as that happened she looked down, turned a page and seemed to become engrossed in what she was reading. So at least she did not expect him to speak to her, which was a relief. But it disturbed him that he was sure he had seen her before, yet could not imagine where or when he had done so.

  But going on worrying about who she was would do no good. Opening the Financial Times, he settled down to the puzzle of trying to understand what had been happening recently to his investments. Besides his university pension and his old-age pension, he had a modest amount of capital, most of it left to him by Nell, whose family a generation or two ago had been wealthy and to whom a small amount of their money had descended. Most of this was in government securities but a little had been more daringly invested in equities, and although Andrew invariably did what his solicitor told him to do about buying and selling these, he liked from time to time to feel that he understood what was happening to them.

  Not that he ever really did. But on a train journey that was too short for starting to read a book, the Financial Times suited him nicely. He had come to the conclusion that perhaps he was a little richer than he had been when last he had looked into the matter, when his train, remarkably punctual, stopped at Braden-on-Thames.

  He did not look towards the woman in the scarlet coat as he got up to leave the train, but out of the corner of his eye he saw that she had risen too and was making her way towards the exit at the far end of the carriage, almost as if she did not want to get off the train too close behind him. He did not see her on the platform. Yielding up his ticket at the barrier, he went out of the station into the fine rain that was falling, hailed a taxi and asked to be driven to Ramsden House, Old Farm Road.