Free Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin

picture at all had so soured Medesco that even in the face of Leiper his co-operation had thenceforth been non-existent. Now, as on previous occasions, he was sitting with an air of massive disapproval, rapidly though with delicacy conveying the fragments of a two-ounce bar of milk chocolate from the table in front of him to his mouth. And the only person who had so far been able to elicit any cordiality from him was Fen, whose capacity for unobtrusive slumber had early on awoken in him a connoisseur’s interest and devotion.
    With grace and efficiency the indistinguishable blondes went about placing a copy of the revised script in front of each person present—a massive typewritten affair, this, neatly bound in green pasteboard and red ribbon. Some at once rummaged in it with an appearance of curiosity and good will, while others, Fen and Medesco among them, ignored it. The blondes thereupon settled down with pencils and notebooks at the ready, and under the chairmanship of Jocelyn Stafford the conference went cumbrously into action.
    Stafford was a well-covered man of middle age, with diminishing brown hair and slightly protruding eyes. Fingering the revised script, he paid it a number of very civil compliments. And to these its author, on his right, somewhat wanly responded. The wanness, Fen thought, was on the whole to be expected. Evan George, a successful popular novelist who had made his name with a succession of those solid, comfortable books about ordinary-people-like-you-and-me to which the female middle classes are so unswervingly loyal, had reacted to his first film job (thrust upon him by Leiper) very much as was to be expected: first with a tempered enthusiasm and confidence; then—since in spite of the lavish praise accorded to his initial draft of the script a great deal of it apparently needed to be altered—with misgiving; and finally, as he surveyed the poor flinders which were all that remained of his original cherished conception, with despair. He was a small, wiry man of some fifty years, with a creased brown face, clothes which looked as if he had contracted the habit of sleeping in them, and a tendency to dyspepsia which he tried to alleviate by the frequent swallowing of magnesium trisilicate in capsules. At his right hand Stuart North monotonously coughed and spluttered, while Madge Crane watched him with a concern which she clearly intended him to observe. Beside her, and eyeing this byplay with sardonic amusement, sat Caroline Cecil, an actress noted in pathetic roles who was destined for the part of Mrs. Weston. And beside her was Griswold’s second in command at the Music Department, surreptitiously reading a novel.
    But of all these people it was the Cranes who were receiving most of Fen’s attention: Madge, black-haired, smooth-complexioned, unconvincingly helpful and bright; Nicholas, reserved, quiet, thirtyish, an assistant director on leaving his public school, a camera-man at twenty-three, a director at twenty-seven: and Maurice, raffish, narrow-eyed, complacent and looking—it occurred to Fen—rather unwell. There was little of family resemblance between them, unless perhaps in the impeccable shape of the nose; but they were united, it seemed, in an uneasiness which betrayed itself by an occasional wordless message delivered from eye to eye. And the reason for that, Fen thought, was scarcely obscure: the motive for Gloria Scott’s suicide had suggested itself to him some time ago, and he was tolerably certain his guess was correct.
    The Cranes, if he were right, did well to be apprehensive, since unless the scandal of the suicide and its motive could be stifled—and it was unlikely that Humbleby would abet this—it might not inconceivably put a full stop to all their careers…
    The conference dragged on. Fen was summoned out of his brooding to put a date to The Rape of the Lock ; the young man from the Music Department, required to specify music for a ballroom scene, suggested