‘About his attempted rape of Millicent Miles when she was a schoolgirl?’
Liz Wenham flinched at this plain speaking, but continued. ‘Your facts were mainly correct, but your interpretation is wrong. Arthur assures me that it was a put-up job between the girl and her father, though he did not perceive this at the time. The girl—er—manœuvred him into a compromising situation, whereupon the father entered the room and surprised them.’
‘Well, that’s certainly a new angle on the story.’
‘Don’t you believe it? It has happened often enough, though not perhaps with a schoolgirl as the agent provocateur. Arthur was young and inexperienced. He’s not got a very great deal of backbone, you know. Anyway, he was made to sign a confession, and he paid the father regular hush-money for several years till Mr. Miles died.’
‘And then the daughter took over?’
‘No. There’s no question of that.’ According to his own account of it, Liz Wenham continued, Arthur Geraldine had not been blackmailed by Miss Miles. He had given her favoured treatment, when the firm took her over, partly because she might prove a remunerative author herself and also help the firm through her contacts in the literary world, and partly, as he had admitted to Liz, from anxiety lest she should begin raking up the past. But in fact she had never referred to it, or to the written ‘confession’ her father had extracted from him, and he assumed now that it had been destroyed after Mr. Miles’s death.
‘So there you are,’ Liz concluded, with a challenging glance at Nigel. ‘It’s a deplorable story, but nothing worse. And I rely on you to keep it to yourself.’
‘Inspector Wright and I would certainly not publicise it. But we could not prevent it coming out in court, if Mr. Geraldine were charged—’
‘But you must see,’ Liz impatiently exclaimed, ‘he had no possible motive.’
‘If the account he gave you is correct. We’ve only his word for it. Or rather, yours.’
‘Are you suggesting that I made it up?’
‘You said just now you’d stop at nothing to preserve the good name of your firm. Wait a minute! The account you’ve given sounds convincing enough to me. But it cannot clear your partner of all suspicion.’
‘But Cyprian Gleed was seen—’
‘Someone wearing a duffel coat, a dark hat and a beard was seen. A smallish person. Neither Mr. Geraldine, nor Ryle, nor Protheroe is tall. Nor, for that matter, are you. The footprints in Miss Miles’s blood show that the murderer was wearing size 10 goloshes. None of you has large feet; you could all get that size of golosh over your shoes.’
Nigel was watching Liz Wenham closely while he spoke. At one point, he noticed, her whole expression changed, making her look vulnerable, almost helpless.
‘But Stephen left the office well before 5.40. I thought that was established,’ she said. It sounded less like a statement than an appeal.
‘Oh yes, he did,’ Nigel drew out a long silence. ‘What a charming flat he has. I don’t wonder he seldom leaves it.’
Liz seemed quite at a loss with this change of subject.
‘Do you know the people he was staying with last weekend? asked Nigel.
‘Yes. The husband is one of our authors.’
‘A close friend of Mr. Protheroe’s?’
‘I couldn’t say how close. But I believe Stephen had a standing invitation to go down there.’
‘Of which he didn’t avail himself till last weekend?’
‘Mr. Strangeways! I dislike insinuation, and I dislike tittle-tattle.’ Liz Wenham was suddenly very angry indeed. Her dumpy body went quite rigid. ‘It would be more straightforward to ask Mr. Protheroe these questions.’
No, thought Nigel, the firm of Wenham & Geraldine doesn’t mean everything to you. He said:
‘I’m sorry. I have a devious mind. And in a murder investigation the straightforward route is not always the most profitable one.’
‘But you are only concerned with the libel trouble. You said so yourself.’
‘Now it’s you who are being evasive, I think. Besides, the libel may be linked with the murder.’ Nigel paused again. ‘Has Stephen Protheroe ever talked to you about his brother, Peter?’
‘The missionary? No. He died years ago, didn’t he? Stephen has always been reticent about his private life.’
‘So you’ve no idea what produced Fire and Ash?’
‘A poet produced it,’ replied Miss Wenham, in her forthright manner.
‘But not out of thin air. No one, the age he was then, could just imagine so much naked experience.’
‘He has a great capacity for suffering, no doubt.’
‘But not for writing out of it, any longer. Tell me,’ Nigel went on, ‘how is Basil Ryle nowadays?’
‘He seems to be coping a bit better,’ Liz coolly replied. ‘You had a talk with him, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. He was in rather a taking—had the idea he might have killed Miss Miles in a brainstorm.’
‘I’m afraid he’s not a very well-balanced character. The war, you know.’ Liz Wenham’s eye wandered, and she spoke in a distrait manner. ‘Not that he isn’t brilliant at his work. It was something of a gamble when we took him into partnership, but it has certainly been justified. A great pity he got himself mixed up with that woman. A brainstorm, did you say?’
‘Yes. So he feared.’
Liz Wenham gave signs of wishing the interview to be prolonged no further—such clear signs of impatience that Nigel, having offered to let himself out, paused for a moment outside the drawing-room door, and heard Miss Wenham dial a number and presently say, ‘Stephen? It’s Liz. Could you lunch with me? At home?’ Her voice, caught up in some extreme urgency of emotion, was barely recognisable. She is a very intelligent woman, thought Nigel as he walked away down the street, and yet somehow a very guileless one.
Late that same afternoon, Inspector Wright rang Nigel at home. The result of the identification parade had been negative, he said: Susan thought she recognised Cyprian Gleed as the person she had seen leaving the office, but was not prepared to swear to it in court. On the other hand, the source of the vitriol had been traced—a friend of Cyprian Gleed’s, who worked in a manufacturing chemists, had supplied him with it. Faced with this evidence, Cyprian had ‘shammed dead,’ as Wright put it—refused to make any statement without legal advice, and been duly charged and arrested. The appeal to the public had so far produced no eye-witness of the hypothetical doings on Hungerford Bridge, thus confirming Inspector Wright in his view that Londoners were an unobservant race. The police had failed to trace the recent purchase of a grip-bag, a duffel coat or a razor by Cyprian Gleed.
‘You’re wasting your time on that, surely. He’d never walk into Wenham & Geraldine’s in his usual attire, if he was going to commit murder. There’d be some attempt at disguise,’ said Nigel.
‘We’re inquiring about the purchase of a light mackintosh, too, of course.’
‘A light mackintosh?’ Nigel was taken aback.
‘Yes. One that’d roll up fairly small and could be stowed easily in the grip-bag. A large-size mackintosh.’
‘Oh, I see. You mean, he’d wear it over his duffel coat, to keep the blood off it, and pack it away as soon as he’d done the job?’
‘Yes. He has an old mac, but there are no traces of blood on it. Therefore we look for a new one.’
‘You think of everything.’
‘I’m paid to, Mr. Strangeways.’
‘But have you thought about the hat? A large, black hat? Very few people wear them in this country. What a giveaway!’
‘Maybe he couldn’t afford a new hat, as well as a mac. He was broke—’
‘Oh bosh! Anyone can steal a hat.’
‘But he knew the office would be almost empty after 5.30. He could be pretty certain there’d be nobody on the top floor or the ground floor, at any rate, and the lift took him past the floor where the partners work.’
‘And the key of the side-door?’
&nbs
p; ‘Ah, if we could trace that to him, it’d be a push-over. I’ve had yet another go at Miriam Sanders—she’s disillusioned at last about young Gleed, by the way, after being told what he tried to do to you—but she swears she never lent him the key, and I believe her. He knew where it was kept, though, and he was in the office the day it disappeared. I’ve no doubt he distracted her attention for a moment and pinched it.’
Sunday passed without event. At half-past ten on Monday morning, while Nigel Strangeways was digesting his breakfast and a report from the Greengarth police, which Wright had sent him by special messenger, the telephone bell rang. It was Arthur Geraldine. In a subdued tone, as though he were condoling with Nigel over a bereavement, he announced that a most unfortunate occurrence had just taken place in the office. Could Nigel spare the time to come along immediately.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’ asked Nigel, half expecting to be told of another death on the premises.
‘The—er—weapon has come to light. A razor. It puts me in a very awkward position. That’s why I rang you first.’
Awkward position, indeed! thought Nigel, fuming with irritation as the taxi bore him eastwards. I bet I know where the razor was found.
He would have won the bet. Five minutes before Geraldine had telephoned, his secretary entered Basil Ryle’s room.
‘Mr. Geraldine would like to look through the Aston Memoirs file before the publicity meeting, Mr. Ryle,’ she said.
‘Never heard of it,’ replied Ryle grumpily.
‘It’s on the top shelf. If I could stand on your chair—’
Ryle relinquished the chair. The girl got on to it, and reached up towards the row of dusty filing boxes ranged along the top of the bookshelf behind the desk. Taking one out, she opened it, withdrew a cardboard folder, from which, as she replaced the box with her other hand, an object slid out and fell on to the desk with a clatter, as though a thread that had held it invisibly suspended for days above Basil Ryle’s head was at last frayed through.
On the desk lay a heavy cut-throat razor. It had sprung open, and where blade met handle there was a little red-brown spot. Basil Ryle stared at it. The secretary stared at him. A spasm, like a paralytic stroke, made one side of his face jerk convulsively.
‘Oh, Mr. Ryle, whatever—?’
‘Get on with it. Take the file to Mr. Geraldine. What are you waiting for?’ Ryle’s voice was calm, lifeless. ‘And this,’ he added, pointing to the razor, as the girl clambered down from the chair. ‘No! Not in your hand. Are you too highbrow to read detective novels? Here, wrap it in my handkerchief. Tell Mr. Geraldine where you found it, and not to mess it up with his fingerprints. Yes, blood does look like rust, doesn’t it? Never mind.’
Ryle’s unnatural composure broke, and he went into a storm of laughter which drove the terrified girl out of the room …
So much Nigel was told when he arrived. Arthur Geraldine’s secretary, having given her account of it, was dismissed. The senior partner and Liz Wenham glanced covertly at Nigel; there was a look in his pale blue eyes which made them uncomfortable: they would have been far more uncomfortable if they had known what a cold, furious anger was mounting behind those eyes.
‘Who asked for this file?’ he curtly demanded.
‘We’re to discuss the publicity for a forthcoming volume of memoirs this morning,’ said Geraldine, ‘and we wanted to refresh our memory about the promotion campaign we did some years ago for a somewhat similar title.’
‘Yes, yes. But whose idea was it to look up the Aston Memoirs file?’
‘Well, actually I think Miss Wenham suggested—’
‘Have you rung the police?’
‘No. I thought it best—’
‘Then do so now, at once.’
While Geraldine telephoned, Nigel opened the razor within the handkerchief, and exposed it to view on the senior partner’s desk.
‘An old-fashioned article, isn’t it, Miss Wenham? And all complete—even to a bloodstain. Most instructive. So now Wenham & Geraldine can live happily ever afterwards.’
Liz Wenham’s clear grey eyes wavered like pebbles in a stream. Her face had the clenched, stubborn expression of a child caught out in some misdemeanour.
‘The inspector is on his way,’ announced Geraldine.
‘Let the dead bury their dead. Who’s with Ryle? Protheroe?’
‘Really, Mr. Strangeways!’ Liz protested. ‘Did you expect us to put him under house arrest?’
Nigel’s anger blazed out at last. ‘Good God in heaven! Who’s talking about arrest? D’you mean to tell me you two have just left him to brood over this alone? When you know the state of mind he’s been in? Are you incapable of thinking about anything but your net profits?’
Snatching up the razor in the handkerchief, Nigel ran along the passage to Basil Ryle’s room.
The young man was sitting at his desk, so white and still that he might well have been a corpse. As Nigel entered, he raised his hands, which lay before him crossed at the wrists, as though handcuffed, then let them fall again on the desk.
‘I thought you were the police. They’re a long time coming.’
‘Snap out of it, Ryle.’
‘I must have done it. Don’t you see?—this proves it.’ Ryle’s chin was on his breast again; his voice was flattened out with utter dejection. Nigel took him by the shoulders, and shaking him hard, forced him to look up.
‘It proves damn all. Here, look at the bloody great thing! No, look at it!’ Nigel opened the handkerchief, laying the razor on the desk. ‘Do you realise what a police search is? They searched the whole building a week ago. Do you really imagine they’d miss a thing like this?’
‘You mean—?’
‘I mean this razor was put into the filing-box after the police search. It was put there yesterday or on Saturday afternoon.’
‘By the murderer?’ asked Ryle, staring, visibly coming to life again.
‘It is not the weapon the murderer used.’
‘But the blood—?’
‘Anyone can draw blood. It’s a commodity we all possess.’
‘Well, it beats me then. Whose razor is it, for God’s sake?’
‘I don’t know for certain. But I think we shall find out that it belongs to a dead man.’
Chapter 16
Final Proof
‘OH YES,’ SAID Nigel, ‘Cyprian Gleed has been arrested all right. This is by way of being a little private experiment of my own. What they call a “reconstruction of the crime”. Just to work out the timing.’
Nigel glanced once again at his wrist-watch. Stephen Protheroe and Basil Ryle exchanged the simpering, embarrassed looks of members of an audience who have been called on to the platform to assist a conjuror. The three men were in Protheroe’s room at Wenham & Geraldine’s; it was late on Monday afternoon.
‘The staff leaves the office in two waves,’ said Nigel, ‘the first at 5 p.m., the second at 5.30. There’s ten minutes to go before the second exodus. Let’s start.’
He put on his mackintosh, picked up a stout grip-bag which lay on the floor, and led the other two out of the room. They took the lift to the ground floor.
‘The side-door is bolted till 5.30. Right?’
‘Right,’ said Stephen.
Nigel went through the swing door and unbolted the side-door beyond it, which gave on to the street. Then, followed by his two companions, turned back and walked through the reception room and out by the main door, watched curiously by Miriam Sanders.
‘I am the murderer,’ he said. ‘Observe closely everything I do, and don’t ask unnecessary questions.’
Taking out a key, he unlocked the side-door. In the space between it and the swing-door, he whisked from his bag a duffel coat and a large black hat, put them on, peered through the swing-door, then dashed for the lift, which was only a few paces away.
‘You’ll have to imagine the beard,’ he said.
‘But how did he know the lift would be at the ground floor?’ R
yle asked.
‘Took a chance on it. Or maybe propped the door open.’
‘But—’
‘Here we are. Follow me, don’t get in the way, and remember that Miss Miles was expecting a visitor.’
Nigel hurried down the passage, past the door of Stephen’s room to the next one. They had met nobody so far. As he entered Millicent Miles’s room, one of his companions gave a sharp exhalation, like the sound of a cat spitting; for the light was on in the room, and a woman sat at the table, typing, her back to the door.
‘For God’s sake—!’ exclaimed Basil Ryle.
‘Shut up! I turn the key, behind my back. I put down the bag. Miss Miles doesn’t look round, she’s expecting me. I take one long stride.’
Whipping a handkerchief from his pocket, Nigel stuffed it into the mouth of the woman at the typewriter, stifling her cry of surprise, and in the same movement tilted her backwards, chair and all, so that her head was flung back and her throat exposed. Her feet began kicking at the desk: he dragged the chair away from it, took out an imaginary weapon, and passed it across her throat.
‘I should be wearing gloves, of course,’ he said. ‘You’ll observe that, holding her in this position from behind, I have her quite helpless. Also, I avoid the blood spurting out, except from my left arm which is clamped round her arms and body.’
Stephen Protheroe shuddered violently. Nigel’s level, expository tones were like those of a surgeon giving his internes a running commentary upon an operation. His back pressed to the wall, as if he were trying to force himself through it, Basil Ryle glared at the scene.
‘Only ten seconds or so since I entered. The victim is dying. The police reconstruction showed that it was done just like this. You must imagine the blood on my forearm and on the floor as I move to the next stage.’
Standing a little away from the chair, Nigel let it down, with its burden, till its back was on the floor. He took the woman under the armpits, drew her away from the chair and dragged her to a corner of the room, where she lay with her black hair streaming over the dusty floor.
End of Chapter Page 20
