Minute for Murder

by Nicholas Blake

  “No,” cried Brian Ingle, misunderstanding him. “She didn’t! I—well, I was looking at her over there. I’d have seen—besides, she wouldn’t have done it; it wasn’t like her——”

  His voice broke. Nigel said gently:

  “People do kill themselves. People you wouldn’t expect to.”

  “But they don’t do it usually in front of a roomful of witnesses,” said Charles Kennington. “Nigel, you said the cup was only a quarter full?”

  “Yes. As you see, that’s very significant. It means the poison couldn’t have been put in till she’d drunk at least half of it—not with a quickly-acting poison like this. And that cuts the murderer’s operative period still finer.”

  Nigel was holding the centre of the floor now, holding them all within the range of his pale blue eyes, which seemed so abstracted but missed so little. He went on:

  “Let’s get back to the cups. Nita’s was on the Director’s desk and Jimmy’s must have been close beside it. When the telephone rang, Nita said, ‘Which is mine?’ And you, Brian, said, ‘This one, isn’t it?’ And Nita said, ‘No, that’s Mr. Lake’s.’”

  “You mean, someone picked on the wrong cup to poison?” asked Merrion Squires, glancing sidelong from Alice Lake to Brian.

  “I just want to get the position of the cups clear,” replied Nigel. “When did you take up your cup again?” he asked Jimmy.

  “Not till I went over to sit on Nita’s table.”

  “How long between putting it down and taking it up?”

  “Couple of minutes. No, less. About a minute, I should say,” the Director replied.

  “And we have evidence,” mocked Merrion Squires, his long clown’s face grinning at them over the back of the chair on which he sat astride, “that, only half an hour prior to the crime, the Director had had a bitter quarrel with M. Squires. Putting two and two together with his well-known genius for mental arithmetic, the astute Strangeways——”

  “My dear,” broke in Charles Kennington, a jagged edge on his voice, “my dear, let us under present circumstances try to avoid the more vulgar forms of facetiousness.”

  Nigel observed that Charles’ delicate small hands were quivering and white at the knuckles. Nita’s death had affected him more deeply than he had cared to betray— that was certain.

  Merrion Squires’ head had jerked sharply, as though from a physical slap in the face, and he was about to make an angry reply, when the tramp of feet was heard in the corridor.

  “That’s the police,” said Nigel, going to the door.

  Presently a doctor was bending over Nita’s body, and a uniformed policeman sitting stolidly by her table, while Nigel had a brief talk with Superintendent Blount in the ante-room. A few minutes later he brought Blount and his accompanying Detective-Sergeant into the Director’s room and effected introductions. The large room seemed to become even smaller. Jimmy Lake must have felt this too, for he asked if they couldn’t clear up the photographs on the floor, which were getting in every one’s way.

  “Rather leave things as they are, sir, just for a wee while,” said Blount in that soothing voice which had given so many criminals so very wrong an idea of him. He broke off, to exchange a few muttered remarks with the doctor, who then took up his bag and departed.

  “T’ck, t’ck. Puir young lady.” Clucking commiserately, Blount turned to them again, an almost Pickwickian figure with his bald head, glittering spectacles and benevolent smile. “Mr. Strangeways tells me, sir, that none of you objects to being searched.”

  The Director discreetly glanced round at his colleagues, like a hostess collecting eyes. “Quite right,” he said.

  “Well, now, that’s splendid. Shall we get it over right away? Sergeant Messer here will attend to it, and a female searcher is coming from Scotland Yard for you, madam.” He bowed to Mrs. Lake. “Now, let me see, you’re all busy people, I know; but I’m afraid we must keep you together in this room till . . . Have you any screens handy, sir?”

  “Yes, there’s a big one in my room; I’ll get it, shall I?” said the Deputy Director, beginning to move towards the door. Superintendent Blount put up a fat hand.

  “I won’t trouble you, sir,” he said. “One of my men outside will fetch it, if you’ll tell me where it is.”

  “My room’s directly opposite this one, across the ante-room.”

  Blount went to the door and gave instructions. Presently the screen was fixed up in a corner of the Director’s room, and the Detective Sergeant started work. Jimmy Lake, by his own wish, was the first to be searched. When he came out from behind the screen he was looking rather white, thought Nigel. Detective-Sergeant Messer emerged, shook his head almost imperceptibly at Blount.

  “You look a bit knocked-up, sir,” said Blount, sympathetically. “A horrible shock for you, I’m sure, this puir young lady—horrible.”

  The Director nodded, speechlessly, pulled out a silk handkerchief and mopped his face. Then he said:

  “Well, Superintendent, you’ll want to make arrangements for interviewing us, I suppose. Together or separately? And I hope you’ll let me have this room back as soon as you can, my dear chap: I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Superintendent Blount nodded and clucked. “Most unfortunate. Most unfortunate. Busy man. Head of Department. Work of national importance. T’ck, t’ck, t’ck. Must go over this room vairy carefully, though. Now, sir, what do you suggest?”

  It was finally arranged that Jimmy Lake should carry on his work from the Deputy Director’s room until his own had been examined, and that Blount should interview the party one by one, after each had passed the search, in the room of a member of the staff who was at present away on leave.

  At eleven o’clock that night Nigel Strangeways and Blount faced each other over a bottle of whisky. They were in a bed-sitting-room at Nigel’s club, where he had lived ever since his wife, Georgia, was killed while driving an ambulance in the blitz of April, 1941.

  “No, I really can not,” Nigel was saying. “These people are my friends, after all; it’s not like those other cases. Besides, in a way I know them too well. I’ve been working with them for five years, damn it, and I can’t see them objectively any more.”

  “Well, your very good health, Strangeways.” The Superintendent gazed ruminatively into his glass. “I’m so terribly short-handed, just now, or I wouldn’t ask you,” he said after a pause.

  “And I’m absolutely fagged out. I don’t have ideas any more, I only have reflex actions.”

  “H’m. Shall we play a game of piquet, then?”

  “By all means.” Nigel fetched the cards and they cut for elder hand. As Blount dealt, he said:

  “Major Kennington ought to be prosecuted for criminal negligence, of course. He’d no business to bring along that poison jigger at all; and then, to hand it round and let it out of his sight—well, it was a scandalous thing.”

  “He couldn’t have supposed there was a would-be poisoner amongst his old friends and relations, just waiting for the chance to—I’m taking all five,” said Nigel, discarding. “Oh, damn and blast this pick-up!”

  “Which suggests that it was he himself who——”

  “My dear old Superintendent, you know as well as I do that it doesn’t suggest anything of the sort. You’re just trying to draw me. All right, I’d rather discuss crime even than play this revolting hand.” Nigel flung his cards on the table and refilled Blount’s glass. “Well, then, where did you find it?”

  “We didn’t. It wasn’t on any of your people. I didn’t expect it to be. But we took that room to pieces this afternoon—and not a smell of the poison jigger. What d’you say now?”

  “But it must be there.”

  “Believe you me, Strangeways, it wasn’t. We don’t miss things—and it’s a bare, bleak sort of room. No, your man must have flipped it out of the window immediately after he’d used it. We looked in the street below, of course, but——”

  “He couldn’t have done that. The win
dows were shut till after the girl died. Then Brian Ingle opened one. Oh, Lord!”

  “Ah-ha!” said Blount.

  “Nonsense. Brian was devoted to Nita. He’d never——”

  “And that is assuming it was Nita the murderer wanted to poison. But there were several cups all close together on the desk.”

  “Look, Blount, if we’re going to discuss this unsavoury subject, we’d better do it in an orderly way. You tell me first what you got out of your interviews.”

  “That’s better.”

  The Superintendent took a gulp of his whisky and smacked his lips demonstratively. He knew how to handle Strangeways, he reflected with some complacence. Drawing a sheaf of papers from his sack-like pocket—typewritten copies of the interviews with the various witnesses—and occasionally glancing at one to refresh his memory, he gave Nigel a résumé of the evidence. As sifted and docketed in Nigel’s mind, it amounted to this:

  First, the poison container. According to Charles Kennington, Jimmy Lake had suggested he should bring it along to the Ministry to show his old friends. According to Jimmy Lake, it was Charles’ idea to bring it; but Jimmy agreed that, when he rang up Charles at Claridge’s yesterday, he had invited him to come to the Ministry, and that it might possibly have been he who had put into Charles’ head the idea of bringing the container then. “When I rang him up,” Jimmy’s evidence ran, “I congratulated him on capturing Stultz, and in the course of it said something about how I’d like to see the ‘This-Way-To-Valhalla’—that’s how he described the thing in his letter to me. Then I asked him to come round this morning, and tell us the story, and—yes, I did say, ‘Bring all your trophies with you.’” Questioned again, Kennington had stuck to it that his brother-in-law had asked him to produce the container when he came. “Bring your trophy with you,” is what he said—what I thought he said, anyway.”

  Second, the party. Of those present in the Director’s room, all but Alice and Edgar Billson had on their own evidence been invited by the Director during the previous day and been told by him that Kennington was going to bring the poison container to show them. It was all over the Division, they said. Billson, however, denied having heard anything about the party until Miss Prince had rung him up, just before eleven o’clock that morning, and asked him to come to the Director’s room. Mrs. Lake said that her brother had telephoned to her the previous day, immediately after his arrival in London. No, it hadn’t been a shock. A happy surprise, certainly; but she had never believed Charles was dead. He had told her he probably couldn’t come and see her till the next day, as he would have to be closeted with some Brass Hats. Her husband had told her about the party, but not invited her; she didn’t go to his office much, anyway, and she would rather be alone with Charles the first time she met him again. Charles, however, when he turned up at her home at ten the next morning, insisted on her going along to the Ministry with him. Neither he nor Jimmy had mentioned to her that he was bringing the container. Mrs. Lake’s evidence was corroborated by her husband and her brother.

  Third, the coffee-cups. The testimony of the several witnesses, though it amplified what they had told Nigel immediately after the event, did not seem to contradict it at any point. Superintendent Blount had painstakingly gone into the history of the cups. Miss Finlay had been immediately behind Miss Prince in the queue at the trolley, and testified that she had seen her go straight into the ante-room with the tray. One of the typists in the ante-room had seen her pass through into the Director’s room. Apart from the obvious improbability of it, there was eye-witness evidence that Miss Prince could not have put some private supply of poison into one of the cups on her way from the trolley. Brian Ingle had been very insistent, furthermore, that she did not use “Stultz’s thing” to poison her coffee. He had hardly taken his eyes off her all the time they were in the Director’s room: “I was very fond of her. And she looked so strange—different, somehow—very excited and beautiful, but somehow I felt she was terribly unhappy—no, perhaps not unhappy—uncertain, on the edge of something, underneath it all.”

  Fourth, the grouping. Blount had worked on this point with great tenacity, checking and counter-checking the movements of each of those present in the Director’s room, from the moment when Nita Prince returned with the tray, in relation to the coffee-cups of the Director and Miss Prince. The gist of this was that, unless Mrs. Lake and her husband and Brian Ingle were all lying, the poison container could not have been used till after the tray had been put down on the Director’s desk, and Nita had told them all to come and get their coffee. From that point there was Alice’s evidence that she had placed the container on the desk behind her, and Jimmy’s that he had noticed it there when he took the designs out of his drawer. Unless they were both lying, it could not have been used up to that point. If they were lying, Blount’s analysis of the grouping showed that every member of the party was at one moment or another near enough the desk to have poisoned Nita’s cup, or the Director’s, while they were putting up the designs on the bookshelf. But why should Jimmy and Alice have both lied, when the lie would only exculpate the others? Finally, Alice had repeated her statement that she had seen the container on the desk when her brother made his remark about “the blood-thirsty type peering out from amidst the bougainvilleas.” If she was telling the truth, this cleared the Director, who was standing in the middle of the room from that point till Nita’s telephone rang, and she carried her cup over to her own table. It also cleared Charles Kennington, who on the evidence of Harker Fortescue had then moved well away to the left of the desk. It did not absolutely clear any one else, for they had all been shifting their positions, close to the desk, to get a good view of the cover-designs, and any one might have poisoned either Jimmy’s cup or Nita’s, which were standing side by side on the desk. On the other hand, the period between Charles’s remark and Nita’s telephone ringing was extremely short—less than half a minute, Blount reckoned. But then again, why should Alice Lake lie when the lie only called attention to her own proximity to the two cups and narrowed down the period within which the poison could have been decanted?

  Fifth, the motive. In his first series of interviews, Blount had contented himself with the formal question, did any one know any reason why the dead girl should have been murdered or have killed herself? The answers had been vague, or entirely negative. Brian Ingle had repeated his statement that she seemed on the edge of something. Merrion Squires said she had been “agitated” that morning and the evening before. The Director, frankly admitting that Nita had been his mistress, said she was very upset when Charles Kennington’s letter came, worrying how her ex-fiancé would take it; she felt they ought to tell Charles the truth, but he had tried to dissuade her from doing this at once—after all, he had said, it was four years since Charles had gone back on active service, and she had not seen him after that, and had had every reason lately to believe he was dead. Charles could not possibly assert any claim over her now, and he might well have lost interest in her, anyway. Major Kennington agreed that he and Nita were “sort of engaged” while he was working at the Ministry, but he said their correspondence had faded out some time before his “death” was announced in the casualty lists, and he had certainly not expected her to “fall into my arms” on his return. Did he know whether her affections had been engaged elsewhere? “No, not for certain. But I didn’t flatter myself a sumptuous girl like Nita would go for long without comforters.”

  Alice Lake said she had known about Nita and her husband for some time. Jimmy, in fact, had told her. She had accepted it; as long as it made him happy, she would put up with it.

  “So there you are,” said Blount,” slapping his bald head repeatedly—a sign that he was perplexed. “We have a murder that might just conceivably have been a suicide. We haven’t a whiff of motive for either suicide or murder. We have a girl poisoned in full view of eight people, including your own good self. We have a poison container which disappears into thin air—no, we roped off the str
eet underneath that room, and we searched every inch of it for fifty yards, either way, and it wasn’t there. It’s a wee thing, of course, and might have got stuck to the tyre of a passing car. I’ve appeals going out on the radio in case any pedestrian picked it up, but I’m not vairy optimistic. And, as if that wasn’t enough, we don’t even know whether the murderer got the person he wanted to: he could easily have poisoned that puir girl’s cup by mistake for Mr. Lake’s. And, worst of all, there’s the spontaneous nature of the crime.”

  “Spontaneous?”

  “No one could have known, till the day before, that there was going to be poison available in the Director’s room.”

  “No one but Charles Kennington.”

  “Granted. And nobody could have relied upon Kennington’s letting the poison container out of his own hands. It’s almost as though the crime had been unpremeditated. ‘By Jove,’ someone says,’ there’s that jigger lying on the desk! Well, since it’s going begging, I might as well break it into one of these coffee-cups’.”

  “Yes, it does seem a spur-of-the-moment job,” agreed Nigel.

  “The hell of it is that we should know all about where the poison came from. The usual way we get a poisoner is through his source of supply, as you know—suspect A is recognised by the chemist who sold him the weed-killer. But this crime of yours——” Blount broke off, throwing up his hands disgustedly.

  “It is a point in favour of suicide, of course. I mean, a person who is in a state of mind favourable to suicide would be more likely to succumb to the impulse, when she found the means handy. A would-be murderer doesn’t wait about, relying on being presented with the means by fortune.”

  “You’d say that it was suicide, then, or else Major Kennington did it?” asked Blount with a shrewd look at Nigel through his steel-rimmed spectacles.

  Nigel was gazing non-committally at his Bonnard on the opposite wall. “I’d like to know where and when Kennington met her yesterday,” he said.