Free Last Nocturne by Marjorie Eccles Page A

this case, since this one was an obvious suicide.
    A strange quiet hung over the street today, even the ever-present traffic noise from the Hampstead Road seemed muted. Now that there was nothing to see, lace curtains which had yesterday been twitched aside all day long once more hung as they should. The excitement had petered out and no one wanted to be reminded of the nasty happening of the day before. The duty doctor with his black bag had gone, as had the photographer with his tripod and magnesium flash, the police sketcher with pad and pencil, the constables standing on guard or taking measurements. All that remained was a chalk mark drawn in as near an approximation as possible of where the body had fallen awkwardly and horribly onto the railings.
    Chief Inspector Philip Lamb stepped back a little, the better to study the frontage of the tall, narrow house, and looked up at the window from which a young man had plummeted to a premature and unnecessary death. Some of the residences in Adelaide Crescent were well looked after, some had seen better days, and this house was definitely one of the latter: not prepossessing, with dingy curtains, an unpolished doorknocker and a sign in the front window advertising rooms to let. ‘Curious time to choose, to do away with himself,’ he remarked.
    ‘The doctor thinks it happened in the early hours. He was found about six o’clock.’
    ‘Well, the darkest hour before the dawn, and all that, optimum time for suicide…but that’s not quite what I meant. I was wondering why a young man at the very height of his success, a painter with a growing reputation, should decide to end it all. Did you know he was showing some of his work at that modern art exhibition running at the Pontifex Gallery?’
    ‘Oh, one of them, sir, was he?’ The corners of Cogan’s mouth turned down.
    ‘That’s no mean achievement, you know. The exhibition’s been causing a bit of a stir, one way and another. A few brickbats, of course, but that’s to be expected.’
    More cautiously, Cogan asked, ‘Admire that sort of thing, do you, sir? This modern stuff?’
    Lamb smiled slightly. ‘Not much, to tell you the truth. I only happened to know about the showing at all, and about Theo, because I know his family a little.’
    ‘That so?’
    The Cockney sergeant was still slightly wary of Lamb, though they’d established a tentative relationship that was growing easier and more friendly as they began to understand each other. One of the newer breed of policeman, middle class, Lamb had left the family business to take on a job in the police (though Gawd knows why, it was a thankless enough job, thought Cogan, who would actually have faced a firing squad rather than admit he secretly enjoyed his work and couldn’t imagine what he was going to do with himself in his looming retirement). It was taking time to become used to working with a younger man, not above thirty-five or six, who’d come straight into the detective branch without having had any experience on the streets: in Cogan’s time in the Force, promotion had generally come through seniority or stepping into dead men’s shoes. Lamb was generally regarded among the rank and file as a toff, a swell who was slumming it, but Cogan had found he was prepared to put in the same hours as any overworked bobby on the beat and wasn’t averse to getting stuck in either. On the whole, they got along pretty well, Cogan throwing in the weight of his own experience to balance what he thought of as Lamb’s occasionally airy-fairy theories.
    All the same, he’d been mildly surprised when Lamb had chosen to visit the scene here. A suicide was commonplace enough. Violent death, including murder in most of its sordid forms, occupied the overworked police to a monotonous extent in the seedier parts of Camden Town and its environs, but it didn’t normally call for the intervention of a chief inspector. Lamb’s interest was explained now.
    Cogan digested the