And So To Murder (22 page)

H.M. silenced him with a fierce gesture. ‘And then what?’

‘Then Tilly tried to come into my room, and wanted me to join her. But I wouldn’t, and O’Brien was there, so she slammed the door and went back into her office.’

H.M. pointed a big finger towards Bill. ‘Yes. And what time did
he
arrive?’

‘Twenty minutes past seven. I’m sure of that.’

‘So. And how long after this did the Parsons woman come in and get the poisoned cigarette?’

‘I – I’m not sure.’

Bill cleared his throat. ‘Nor am I,’ he said, ‘in much of a position accurately to tell the time there. My impression was that it was about seven-thirty.’

‘Near enough,’ Monica acknowledged.

H.M. got to his feet.

‘Come with me, all of you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something I’d rather like to show you.’

‘T
HAT
’s it,’ said Bill.

He pointed to the half-smoked cigarette which still lay along the baseboard where he had kicked it.

The four of them stood in Monica’s office. They had come down to the Old Building in Bill’s car, but only after H.M. and Masters had gone into a long conference with Hackett, Fisk, and Frances Fleur. It was a conference to which Monica and Bill were not admitted; they were compelled to kick their heels and fume in an outer room. Yet, curiously enough, the conference seemed to have no noise of animosity in it. On the contrary they could have sworn they once heard a shout of jubilation from Thomas Hackett.

H.M. planted himself in the middle of the office. He was wearing a bowler hat. Owing to a complaint from the Secretary for War that H.M.’s usual headgear was a disgrace to Whitehall in wartime, he had been persuaded to replace it with a new bowler: neat, not gaudy. Yet the spectacle of H.M. in a bowler hat is one which has to be seen to be believed.

This article ornamented – let us be charitable – his head as he peered round, sniffing the air. He lumbered over to where the cigarette lay; he bent over and with infinite labour picked it up. He smelt it.

‘This is the little joker, right enough,’ he said. ‘Have a whiff, Masters.’

The chief inspector studied it, and scowled uneasily.

‘Oh, ah. But see here, sir: how was it done? This looks like an ordinary Player’s cigarette. Got the name printed on the unsmoked end, and everything. If the murderer soaked his tobacco in a solution of belladonna and then rolled it, he did a very neat job. It’s not so easy to roll a cigarette so it looks like a machine-made one.’

‘I can tell you how to do that,’ said Bill. ‘Tilly told me.’

Masters swung round sharply. ‘Miss Parsons told you?’

‘Yes. It seems that in New York you can buy little machines for rolling cigarettes at any drug-store. The state recently put up the price of cigarettes to eighteen cents for twenty – about ninepence at the normal rate of exchange, though Lord knows what it is now – and a number of people have taken to rolling their own. If you used English tobacco and a Player’s cigarette-paper (though I don’t know where you’d get that) you could make a perfect counterfeit. Tilly has one of the little gadgets herself.’

The chief inspector’s brow darkened with suspicion.

‘Is that so, now?’ he mused, in a sinister voice. ‘So the lady’s got one herself, has she?’

H.M. was not impressed.

‘Oh, Masters, my son!’ he said wearily. ‘Stop goin’ off the deep end again! I can tell you an easier way than that. Just dip half of the cigarette into your solution, and let it dry. The colour of the paper will be a bit different afterwards, but not noticeably. Belladonna – don’t you remember we ran into its derivative, atropine, in the Felix Haye case? – is a colourless liquid. The maker’s name proves it, son.’

‘Not to me it doesn’t,’ snapped Masters. ‘Just you look here, sir.’

He went to the red leather box on the desk, and tapped it.

‘Presumably,’ he went on, ‘there was only one poisoned fag in here. That’s to say, it isn’t likely the murderer would have shoved in a whole handful. Anyway, we can find out by counting them. But’ – he raised a finger impressively – ‘there was one doctored cigarette and fifty harmless ones. And Miss Parsons gets the doctored one first crack out of the box. No, sir. That’s not reasonable: unless she knew which one it was. And I’ll just lay you a little bet she did.’

H.M. eyed him curiously.

‘So you see somethin’ fishy about it, too?’ he inquired. ‘Uh-huh. Just a minute.’

In an absent-minded way he went to the door of Tilly’s office, opened it, and blinked at the room inside. The light was still on; a faint odour of the cigarette still remained. The room was, as usual, strewn with crumpled papers. A cup of now-cold coffee stood on the desk beside the standing ash-tray.

H.M. lumbered over. He looked at the ash-tray, its edges scarred with burns. He examined the cup of coffee. Then he went wandering round the room, inspecting everything.

‘I say,’ he called out. They could not see his face. ‘Was the gal drinkin’ coffee just before the poison got her?’

Masters was after this like a terrier.

‘Hold on, sir! What’s the game? Is there a double-cross in this? Are you trying to tell us she might have got the poison in the coffee?’

‘No,’ said H.M. ‘The poison was in the cigarette all right.’ Still without looking round at them, he put his hands up to his temples and pressed them there. ‘I was askin’ a plain question, and I’d like a plain answer. Was she drinking coffee when the poison got her?’

Monica and Bill exchanged glances.

‘I don’t remember,’ Monica answered. ‘I don’t even remember looking in there. I expect she was, though. She drank coffee all day.’

‘Yes,’ said H.M. ‘You mentioned that before. That’s the whole sad, sweet story: she drank coffee all day.’

H.M. turned round. His face had a queer look which was a good deal more sinister than Masters’s darkest scowl.

‘Look here,’ he said to Monica. ‘Just start in again, slowly, and tell me everything that happened to you since the time you ditched this feller at the War Office to-day. You be like the old detective stories: don’t leave
anything
out, no matter how unimportant it seems. For the love of Esau, think!’

‘But there’s nothing I haven’t told you,’ Monica protested. ‘Except, of course –’

‘Except what?’

‘Except that I met Jimmy, the page-boy, on the way down here.’ She explained this, and to her astonishment H.M. listened with grim attention. ‘That’s all,’ she concluded, ‘though I shouldn’t put any great reliance on what he says. He also told me Miss Fleur was carrying a beer-bottle when he met her on the Eighteen-eighty-two set just before …’

Monica stopped, somewhat frightened. Her three listeners whirled round to her.

‘A beer-bottle,’ muttered Chief Inspector Masters. ‘Gawdlummy-charley!’

‘Yes, but what about it?’

‘The acid that was poured at you,’ said Bill, ‘was poured out of a beer-bottle. I found it upstairs at the doctor’s house and took it along to the War Office in my brief-case to-day.’

There was no time to comment on this. From outside there was the noise of a rush on the Old Building, as though it were being attacked. Thomas Hackett, a hooded electric torch in his hand, burst in on them. Behind him stumbled Howard Fisk, adjusting his pince-nez.

‘It’s all right,’ the producer said. ‘We don’t need the police. I’m not a praying man, but, by George! I could fire away a couple of prayers now. Tilly’s up.’

H.M. stared at him, and seemed to be swallowing a prayer himself.

‘Up? Easy, son. You mean it’s all up with her?’

‘I mean she’s sitting up,’ shouted Mr Hackett. He was so excited that the torch slid out of his hand and smashed on the floor. ‘The doctor gave her two injections of some stuff called pilocarpine, and she sat up and clouted him one. She’s up there drinking brandy and swearing a blue streak. The doctor nearly fainted. He says she must have a constitution like a goat; he says he’d back her to swallow six tin cans and a pint of liquid concrete without turning a hair. She’s not going to die: do you understand that?’

Mr Hackett cleared his throat. He got out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. With a kind of shudder, as though he were so relieved that it almost choked him, he sat down on the couch. Howard Fisk was looking rather white.

‘It is a relief,’ the director conceded in his soft voice. ‘It is a great relief. After that ingenious game of tease-the-listener you played on us, Sir Henry, it is something to know that none of us has murder on his conscience. At the same time, I have a complaint to make. What have you done to poor old Frances?’

‘Frances?’ said H.M.

The director took two steps forward.

‘Yes, Frances. If I were you I should take some care. Gagern is back from town, and he is looking for you. I shouldn’t be surprised if you were challenged to a duel with the
Schlager
. What did you say to her, in that private interview you had? She went away crying. I know, because I saw her. I didn’t even know she could cry. For five years I’ve been trying to make her do it in films, and I can’t. What did you say to her?’

H.M.’s eyes were shading his forehead under the remarkable bowler hat.

‘I told her a few home truths,’ he said rather dully. ‘Sit down, son.’

‘Home truths? You mean …?’

The director’s mouth worked. He looked at Mr Hackett. He did not seem to know what to do with his large-knuckled hands.

‘I said: “Sit down, son.”’

Yet, Monica thought, there were some grounds for Mr Fisk’s uneasiness. Kurt von Gagern, who arrived just then, was in no frame of mind to be trusted. He breathed noisily through his nose, which stood out reddish and as though detached from his face. Under the brim of his rakish soft hat, which shaded eyes watery from cold, the look he directed at H.M. could not be called respectful.

‘Where,’ he said, ‘is my wife? What have you done with my wife?’

‘She’s all right,’ H.M. assured him. ‘She’s maybe a little upset over bein’ asked some inconvenient questions about a beer-bottle and three anonymous letters; but I got no doubt she’ll get over it.’

‘A beer-bottle and three anonymous letters? What exactly do you mean?’

‘If you’ll all make yourselves comfortable,’ said H.M., ‘I’ll tell you. We’d better have this out here and now.’

An abrupt silence, with something of an unpleasantly eerie quality in it, set them all looking at each other. H.M. went into Tilly’s room and returned with two chairs. He made Monica sit down in one of these, facing the others, as though she were a school pupil on exhibition. He himself sat down in the chair beside the desk.

Removing his bowler hat, he put it down carefully. He picked up the red leather box, and drew it over so that everybody could see it. Then, with the greatest deliberation, he drew a black pipe and an oilskin tobacco-pouch from the pocket of his baggy coat. Still deliberately, he unscrewed the pipe and blew down the stem. His puffed cheeks and cross-eyed concentration, under the light which Monica had shaped with a newspaper, gave him rather the appearance of an elderly Humpty Dumpty. He fitted the pipe together, filled it with a tobacco which tasted like the steel-wool that is used to clean kitchen sinks, and lighted it. The smoke curled up round his head, into the cone of the lamp.

‘Masters,’ he continued, settling himself back at ease, ‘you made a thunderin’ good suggestion a while ago.’ He reached out and tapped the lid of the leather box. ‘These cigarettes. Count ’em.’

‘Eh?’

‘Turn ’em out and count ’em. Let us hear you count ’em.’

Masters, frowning, opened the box and rolled the pile of cigarettes across the desk. He pushed them to one side in neat, swift batches, like a bank-clerk.

‘Four, eight, twelve, sixteen. Twenty, twenty-four, twenty-eight, thirty-two. Thirty-six, forty, forty-four, forty …’ Masters stopped. His face grew more ruddy. He went back and began to count again; then he blinked at H.M.

‘No, son,’ said H.M., who appeared to be deriving intense satisfaction from his pipe. ‘You didn’t make any mistake. Now we can go ahead with a clear conscience, and know smackin’ well we’re right. The would-be murderer had an awful nasty break from the cussedness of things in general.’ He made a gesture towards Bill Cartwright. ‘
You
count ’em, son.’

‘See here –’ began Thomas Hackett, running a finger round inside his collar.

Bill himself had for some minutes been conscious of trouble ahead. But instead he wanted to laugh. The spectacle of Gagern, Fisk, and Hackett, sitting side by side on the couch and facing Monica was not one that could be seen with a grave face. Yet his brain felt heavy and dull. He had counted the cigarettes twice before he realized what the total was.

‘There’s something wrong,’ he said, in a voice which blattered out with startling loudness. ‘There are only forty-nine cigarettes here.’

Thomas Hackett jumped up, and sat down again.

‘That’s right, son,’ agreed H.M., waving a sticky cloud of smoke away from in front of his face. His ghoulish relish deepened. ‘Now Joe –’

‘I do not know whom you are calling “Joe”,’ said Gagern, his voice rather shrill.

‘We’ll consider it unsaid, then. To-day,’ continued H.M., ‘you asked me six questions, which had to be answered before we could see daylight in this business. Uh-huh. If you’ll just ask the same questions again, I’ll try to answer ’em.’

Gagern hesitated.

‘I do not remember the order of the questions; but what they were I remember with a painful clarity. Very well. The first question is, who stole the film, and why?’

H.M. took the pipe out of his mouth.

‘There never was any film stolen, son,’ he said.

If a small bomb had exploded under the sofa, there could not have been any more uproar.

‘See here,’ said Mr Hackett, again running his finger round inside his collar, and appealing to Masters. ‘I don’t want to seem critical, Mr Masters, but is your friend raving mad? Do you deny the film is gone?’

‘I don’t deny it’s gone,’ said H.M. ‘All I said was: it wasn’t stolen.’

‘Are you accusing me of stealing my own film?’