The Journeying Boy (8 page)

The manager nodded. ‘An atomic one. The biggest noise in the entire noisesome history of the screen. Sound’s greatest triumph. The explosion kills seventy-five thousand supers hired at five dollars a head. It also blows the clothes off a gaggle of girls in a cabaret. It’s all very disheartening to people like ourselves. To say nothing of being an invitation to murder. For plainly the shot was fired just as the sound-track triumphantly broke the record. Ingenious, come to think of it. The poor fellow must have been lured in expressly to be shot under cover of that hideous row. And then he was robbed.’

‘Robbed?’ Cadover turned sharply on the sergeant.

‘I don’t think it should be called that, sir. Everything – or nearly everything – was certainly lifted from the body. But there was more to it than that. Bits of the clothing were cut away.’

‘Bits of the clothing.’

‘Yes, sir. You know there are three places where a good tailor usually sews in a tab with a name – an inner jacket pocket, a waistcoat pocket, and the inside of the trouser-tops at the back. Well, all these places have been cut out.’

There was a silence while Cadover verified this. ‘I can understand the shooting,’ he said. ‘With a smokeless powder, and when the audience was stunned and distracted by that uproar, the thing would be possible enough. But that anyone should then be able to tumble the body about–’

The slinky young man giggled. ‘It was in the back row, Inspector, and you must remember how people do behave in a cinema – and particularly there. Lovers embrace and fondle each other in the darkness–’

‘That’s deplorably true.’ The manager had assumed an expression of refined repugnance. ‘With a little care, this bold rifling of the body could be made to bear the appearance of mere amorous dalliance. What a splendid point for the Sunday papers that will be.’

Cadover frowned. ‘Initials? Laundry marks?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant nodded. ‘Several of the undergarments have the initials P C.’

Once more the slinky young man giggled. ‘I don’t suppose that they could stand for Police Constable, could they?’

The manager looked offended. ‘Really, Louis, this is no occasion for unfeeling jokes. A hard-boiled attitude is quite out of place.’ The manager lit a cigarette, strolled across the room, and glanced indifferently down at the body. ‘About thirty, would you say? And a military type. Nothing like the Army for wiping off an individuality a face may once have been blessed with. You could pick half a dozen almost identical young officers out of any line regiment.’

This was true. For that sort of identification which is sometimes achieved with the aid of smudgy photographs exhibited outside police-stations or in the Press there could scarcely, Cadover reflected, be a less promising subject. Not that it ought to come to that. Perhaps, within a few hours, and almost certainly within a few days, there would be a link-up with one of the endless inquiries after missing persons that flow in upon the Metropolitan Police. A body not ultimately thus identified would be a rarity indeed… He turned to the sergeant. ‘Everything been done here?’

‘Yes, sir. And Inspector Morton is in a room just opposite.’

‘I’ll see him now. Have the body removed.’ Cadover nodded curtly to the manager and walked out. The foyer was crowded.
Plutonium Blonde
was over. The evening’s final showing of the programme was about to begin.

Inspector Morton was interviewing a succession of girls dressed in bell-bottomed white trousers and enormous scarlet bows. Two constables were making shorthand notes and another was recording the proceedings on a dictaphone. The room was a humbler version of that occupied by the manager, and there was another Dürer engraving on the wall. Perhaps it belonged to the slinky young man called Louis.

‘All we found.’ Inspector Morton had interrupted himself to jerk a thumb at a table behind him. Cadover crossed to it and saw a bunch of keys, a pile of loose change, and a pocket diary.

‘Finger-prints?’

‘Been attended to. The diary was in the hip-pocket and must have been missed when the body was rifled. It has a few interesting scribbles.’ Morton turned back to the girl before him.

Cadover picked up the diary. It was new and at a first glance appeared entirely unused. He turned to the page for that day. Scrawled in pencil he read:

gun for boy 1.15.

He turned to the preceding page and found:

N I police re guns etc.

Light railway from Dundrane

Two days earlier he found:

Bolderwood

Hump

He continued to search. Throughout the diary there was only one other entry. It occurred six days before and read:

Smith’s 7.30

Cadover put down the diary, picked up the bunch of keys, and examined them carefully one by one. Then he did the same with the little pile of silver and copper coins. One florin he inspected for some time. Then he turned round. A pair of sailor’s trousers – very tight above and baggy below – was swaying from the room, and Inspector Morton was staring at this departure in unflattering absence of mind. ‘Cadover,’ he said, ‘do you think it might be terrorists?’

‘No.’

Morton sighed. ‘It was easy to do, and the setting will give it sensational value. But no doubt you’re right. Some of these girls are far from being fools. A lot behind, but something on top as well.’ Morton paused and, getting no response to this, sighed again. ‘To begin with, something emerges from the box-office. They have been showing to full houses, but when the lights went up and the body was noticed there was one empty seat on its left and three on its right. Four people had left before the end of
Plutonium Blonde
– before the end, that is to say, of its first showing of the day. So there was no question of those people leaving when the film reached the point at which they had come in. Moreover, for that showing those seats could be booked – and they
had
been booked. So I thought at once of quite a little gang on the job. They had their victim nicely isolated, and after killing him they all cleared out. But there is a point that is pretty conclusively against that.’

‘The booking?’

‘Exactly. When you book, the girl in the box-office hands you the numbered tickets and makes a blue cross on the correspondingly numbered seats on a plan. And here we come upon the blessings of industrial psychology. How to make blue-pencil crosses on a plan with most speed and least fatigue. Pushing up production per man-hour – or girl-hour, in this case.’

‘Ah.’ Cadover’s expression indicated no appreciation of this embroidery.

‘Two seats is
zig-zag, zig-zag
. Three seats is
zig-zag-zig, zig-zag-zig.
In other words, you can study the line of crosses and distinguish the number of seats booked at a time. Of the five seats in question, three were booked at one go, and two at another. There can have been no concerted booking of all five.’

‘Does that follow? The bookings may have been successive. One fellow comes immediately behind the other and simply says he’ll have the next three.’

Morton shook his head. ‘In this case, I think not. The block of three has been crossed off with a much more recently sharpened pencil than the block of two. And if one wanted to make sure of all five seats one would scarcely–’

‘Quite. But does the girl in the box-office remember anything about the people concerned?’

‘Definitely not. It couldn’t be expected. The job is purely mechanical and she must have lost all interest in the faces peering in on her long ago. But it’s a different matter when we come upstairs to the usherettes. We get far more than we might hope for from them… Look here, I’ll draw a plan. It will explain the situation until you can see for yourself.’ And Morton reached for a pencil. ‘The seats in question we’ll call
ABCDE
, and you can see that
A
comes next to a gangway. It’s the back row, remember, so there’s nobody behind. From the people in front and to the right we may get something, though I doubt it now. The body was in
B
. And it was
ABC
that were booked together in a block of three, and DE that were booked together in a block of two… I think we may say that something of a picture begins to emerge.’ And Morton tapped his pencil with some complacency on the table before him.

Cadover grunted. ‘What about those usherettes?’

‘Ah! Well, there’s a girl who remembers showing the dead man to his seat. But he didn’t bring three tickets; he brought two. And there was already someone – a woman – in
A
. Nobody remembers the woman arriving. She may just have had her counterfoil taken at the entrance and found her way to her seat herself. You can see it was an easy one to find. But her ticket, mind you, had been bought along with
B
and
C
.’

Cadover committed himself to his first judgement. ‘Good,’ he said.

‘And this girl remembers who came with the dead man. It was a boy. He might have been about fifteen. Now, of course, that’s pretty queer. It suggests that the crime was perpetrated by a woman and a lad. Not but what the woman’s function isn’t clear.’

‘It is at least conjecturable.’

Morton nodded. ‘Put it that way, if you like. The dead man believed that on his left there was a stranger having no interest in him. Actually, the woman may have been his murderer. And certainly she had her part to play as soon as he was dead. Everything that might serve to identify the body–’

‘Quite so. The manager here has tumbled to that. The job was done under the appearance of hugging and being hugged.’ Cadover stared sombrely at Morton’s plan. ‘And then this woman, and the boy who had lured the victim to his fate, slipped out. Did anyone remark that?’

‘No. We have nothing but the arrival of the man and boy. By the way, though, it was something about the boy that had struck the usherette’s attention. He wore a bowler hat.’

‘Is there anything so remarkable in that? You and I both wear bowler hats.’

Morton chuckled. ‘That’s because we are both a particular sort of policeman. Mere lads don’t often wear them nowadays. Possibly some conservatively inclined office-boys in the city still do, but on the whole it’s a habit confined to a few public schools which like their boys to dress like that when in Town. That’s what attracted the notice of this usherette – the glamour attaching to our fading institutions of privilege.’ Morton lingered over this phrase with evident pride. ‘And she says that he didn’t look quite right. She
says
that
that’s
why she noticed him. Bowler hat and all, he didn’t look quite right… But one would expect her to say that now.’

‘Of course one would – but then might she not be correct?’ Cadover smiled a rare smile. ‘Public schoolboys with lethal intentions are quite wrong.’ His expression grew dark again. ‘Commonly they have to wait till they grow up and we turn them into airmen and soldiers.’

‘No doubt.’ Morton was slightly shocked. ‘Anyway, that’s all we have about
ABC
. But we also have something about
DE
. Another usherette is sure she noticed two people who must have come from
DE
. She noticed them because they came out in a bit of a hurry and almost caused a disturbance. They came out
to the right
– that is to say, not past
ABC
, but past a much longer line of seats, all occupied, on the other side. People sometimes come blundering out because they are feeling ill, and this usherette came forward in case it was anything like that. She shone a torch for them and then caught a glimpse of them in the light of an opening door. It was a boy and a girl.’

‘Children, does she mean?’

‘Not exactly. As a matter of fact, there’s something odd there. She is quite clear that the girl was about seventeen. But when I asked the age of the boy, she first said that he looked no more than twelve, but later corrected that and declared he might have been sixteen.’

Cadover considered. ‘Well, it was only a momentary glimpse, and a conflicting impression of the sort might be quite possible. Did she notice anything about them in particular?’

‘It was the lad who was really in a hurry, she says. He was bustling out the girl, who was just bewildered and a little cross. Well, of course there was one attractive explanation of that. This lad, sitting perhaps in
D
, became aware that something horrid had happened on his left, and he decided to get his girl and himself clear of it. An adult, as we very well know, is apt to behave in just that way, and it would be very understandable in a boy. But, as it happens, there’s a big difficulty in taking that view. For the usherette is quite confident that those two young people pushed out
before
the big bang. They were clear of the auditorium
before
the girl in the picture is represented as letting off the bomb.’

‘The girl lets it off?’ Cadover frowned at his own irrelevance. ‘Of course, the lad may simply have tumbled to the fact that, although nothing nasty had actually happened on his left, something of the kind was working up. Not that that’s a likely explanation. The essence of the killing must have lain in sudden and unsuspected assault. Perhaps the film makes another big noise a bit earlier?’

‘Apparently it doesn’t. Even for a revolver with a silencer – which is a clumsy thing – there would be just the one chance. We must take it that the couple in
DE
left before either murder or hint of murder. In fact, it looks as if they are out of the picture. Whatever their reason for leaving early, it just doesn’t concern our affair.’ Morton hesitated. ‘Only the usherette noticed one other odd thing. I wonder if you could guess what it was?’

Cadover shook his head, his expression indicating the conviction that the case stood in no need of conundrums arbitrarily added.

‘The lad she saw leaving had a bowler hat.’

‘Um.’ Cadover’s was a quintessentially noncommittal grunt.

‘So it almost looks as if the lad who appeared to leave
DE
was the same who arrived in company of the dead man to occupy
BC
.’