Minute for Murder

by Nicholas Blake

  The Superintendent positively bounced in his chair. “What the devil d’you mean? He said nothing about—— ”

  “That’s just it. Why didn’t he? When he turned up in the Director’s room this morning, he greeted us all very vivaciously, as long-lost friends. Then Nita said to him, ‘You do look different in uniform.’ Now, when he was working at the Ministry, in 1940–41, he always wore uniform. If Nita hadn’t seen him since then—in fact, if she hadn’t seen him very recently, in mufti, why should she say that? Kennington tried to cover it up very quickly. He started babbling away again, said, ‘It seems years since I saw any of you,’ and Nita took the cue and remarked presently that he’d only been wearing one medal ribbon when last she saw him. I suggest, Blount, that it would be worth your while to look particularly close into Nita’s movements, and Charles’s, yesterday. I say they met somewhere, and he was in mufti.”

  “Oh, you ruffian!” exclaimed Blount, rubbing his hands in high glee. “Here’s the man who doesn’t want to have anything to do with the case! Routine investigation, mind you, routine investigation. We’re looking into the girl’s movements, of course. And her history. We’ve been going over her flat this evening. One or two vairy interesting little finds.” He paused suggestively, but Nigel did not rise to the bait. “And now you’ve uncorked yourself, what else have you to tell me?”

  Nigel related the conversation between the Director and Nita which Merrion Squires had overheard the previous day, and the quarrel between Harker Fortescue and Edgar Billson reported to him by Miss Finlay. There were several little signs and omens filed away in his mind, but he was not going to lay them before Blount yet.

  “Oh, well, now. Miss Prince seems to have been a—eh—a stormy petrel,” said the Superintendent. He mixed himself another glass of whisky, held it up to the light, drank. “Invigorating beverage. Most invigorating. . . . And what did you think about her?” he shot out suddenly.

  “I wish you wouldn’t use your third-degree tricks on me,” protested Nigel. “My nerves won’t stand it. I didn’t think about my colleagues much. Who does? What do you think about Detective-Sergeant Messer?”

  “A good man. Energetic. Ambitious. A bit of a snob. Clever. But too apt to jump to conclusions—he’s young, you see—and when you’re young and clever, you get impatient with routine detail; you see the logical conclusion afar off, so you’re apt to jump some of the stages on the way to it.”

  “He’s not thorough, you mean?”

  Blount looked really shocked. “My dear sir, he’s a trained man. Our men are always thorough. I said ‘impatient’ over detail. He wouldn’t live an hour with me if he scamped it.”

  “Well, let’s say he’s a human being trained to be a machine, and leave it at that. Now, that’s my point. We in the Visual Propaganda Division—we’re all human beings, rather clever and unusual ones, for the most part, and we’ve been trained, or had to train ourselves, in a highly technical, highly mechanical routine. The first principle of our kind of propaganda is the human touch; but, to keep pace with the demands, we had to mechanise it—to work out a detailed, inhuman sort of routine for delivering the human touch punctually and in large quantities.”

  “A mass-emotion factory?” suggested Blount.

  “If you like. And the operatives are engaged in producing natural emotions by artificial methods. Bad for them. You can understand the effect this was likely to have on their private lives. It led to a certain unreality, and therefore a certain irresponsibility, in their ordinary human relationships.”

  “You’re thinking of Nita Prince?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I’m thinking chiefly of the Director.” Nigel paused a moment. “Merrion Squires described Nita as a carnivorous orchid. He’s too fond of flashy phrases. She’s—she was a good deal more complicated than that. But Merrion had the right idea, in one way. I fancy her surface was very deceptive. ‘A beautiful blonde’—suppose I say that, what do you think of?—an easy, decorative, rather nit-witted creature: a pin-up girl with flashing teeth and legs a mile long and a figure that means one thing only: a smooth, golden, varnished, primitive phantasy. Now Nita was all that. On the surface. But something more too. There was something in her eye, and her voice, that said, ‘I’m really quite different underneath. Am I fire, or ice? Wouldn’t you like to know? Come and find out.’”

  “And what did you find?”

  “I didn’t accept the invitation myself. I don’t know who did, apart from Kennington and the Director. Brian Ingle thought her a goddess; Merrion Squires, a straight bitch. Infinite variety. I dare say they were just painting their phantasies on that smooth, white surface. And suppose—just suppose, Blount—that beneath it she wasn’t fire, or ice, but an ordinary woman, vulnerable, foolish and shrewd, a realist about her own feelings, a self-deceiver about others’; wanting a home and children, maybe—a cosy, humdrum life with hubby coming back from the office at five p.m. and a fortnight at Skegness in the summer. Suppose she hated being a sort of shiny human Odeon, a Palace of Pleasure, a Temple of Mystery——”

  “I’m thinking you’d better meet me at her flat to-morrow morning, if Mr. Lake will give you leave off,” said Blount.

  “Suppose that was what she wanted someone to find out,” Nigel pursued, “wouldn’t you have an interesting motive for——?” He broke off a moment. “That reminds me. A queer little slip of the tongue. Probably means nothing. I told you Charles Kennington used a phrase about one of Squires’ designs—‘a blood-thirsty type peering out from amidst the bougainvilleas.’ A few minutes later, Mrs. Lake repeated the phrase exactly. There was a mild joke—the Deputy Director saying the design was suitable for a volume of Bloomsbury belleslettres. Well, after it happened, I was trying to find out what had become of the poison container. And Mrs. Lake said she had last noticed it on the desk when Charles said, ‘The murderous type peering out from amidst the bougainvilleas.’ One word changed, which she had got right before. It may have been pure accident. On the other hand, that piece of evidence cleared her husband: if the container was still on the desk at that point, you’ll remember, he could not have poisoned Nita’s coffee. But, if she’d seen him do it, or suspected that he might have done it, and wished to shield him, that is just the lie a clever woman would tell. And the slip of the tongue which made her say ‘murderous’ would reveal what was in her mind.”

  “E’eh, well. That’s too fanciful for me,” said Blount, rising to go. “It’s terrible late. I must be off. A most interesting chat, Strangeways. I’m obliged to you. And if you should happen to be at 19 Dickens Street at ten o’clock to-morrow . . .” At the door, Blount turned again. “And don’t forget, her husband was not the only person in the room cleared by that piece of evidence of Mrs. Lake’s.”

  CHAPTER IV

  REFERENCE: MISS N. PRINCE

  “SO THIS,” SAID Nigel, peering inquisitively about him, “is the love-nest.”

  It was 10.30 on the following morning. Nigel had gone to the Ministry even earlier than usual and, working rapidly, polished off several jobs outstanding from the previous day. He then went to look for the Director, whom he found in his room talking with the Ministry’s Investigations officer, Mr. Adcock—a fat, cheerful, lethargic ex-policeman who, apart from the mysterious outbreak of coat-slashing last winter, had had nothing worse on his hands than the usual lost property and petty pilfering troubles since he was appointed to the Ministry.

  “Yes, Nigel?” Jimmy Lake asked gently. He looked washed out and preoccupied. Nigel told him of Superintendent Blount’s request.

  “But of course,” said Jimmy. “Take the day off. Call it duty-leave. And I’d like to borrow your room and your assistant, if I may: I don’t find this room terribly congenial just now.”

  They had a few more words together. Edgar Billson was creating, the Director said, because he was due to go on leave at the end of the week, and the police had requested that none of those present in Jimmy’s room the previous morning should leave L
ondon. The work of the Division was going to be seriously hampered by the police investigation, tactful and reasonable though Superintendent Blount seemed to be. And on top of this there was the idiotic little trouble of a missing secret file. However, Jimmy wouldn’t bother him with that now: Mr. Adcock and the Registry would have to thrash it out between them.

  Nigel stopped on the way out to tell Miss Finlay that the Director would be using his room.

  “You’d better ask now for all his telephone calls to be switched to my extension. Look after him, won’t you? He’s just about all in.”

  Pamela Finlay was relatively subdued this morning. Indeed, the whole floor gave the impression of an uneasy and muted atmosphere, as though someone were gravely ill: voices spoke more quietly, feet trod more discreetly, and the sudden rattle of a typewriter sounded like a quarrel in a sick room.

  “Some of the typists are in a flap,” said Miss Finlay with a strenuous effort to moderate her usual breezy tones.

  “What, afraid they’ll be the next to go? Tell them not to be such asses.”

  “I will,” said Miss Finlay formidably. “It’ll be a pleasure. Gossip, gossip, gossip all the time, those girls. Is it true, Strangeways, that you’re in with the police? They’re saying——”

  “The Superintendent is an old friend of mine. By the way, what’s this about a secret file missing. Have you heard anything?”

  “No. Oh, wait a minute. Is that the file the Director was clamouring for yesterday afternoon? PHQ14/150? Haven’t they found it yet? I bet the D.D. is sitting on it.”

  Nigel remembered vaguely now. Merrion Squires had come in, about five o’clock, asking for some file which the Registry claimed had been charged to the Director, but which he had not received. Nigel had paid no attention to it at the time, beyond asking Miss Finlay to make sure it was not in their room. He remembered her shocked expression, though, when Merrion Squires said, “Secretaries come and secretaries go, but files go on for ever.”

  “The Irish,” he said now, “do not have quite our ideas about the sanctity of human life.”

  Miss Finlay’s eyes widened.

  “So it was Merrion Squires. Have the police arrested him?”

  “Great Scott, no! I was thinking about the Irish character, not—you really mustn’t jump to conclusions like this, or you’ll involve me in an action for slander.”

  “Sorrow,” said Miss Finlay, without any obvious sign of remorse. “Forget it. Not but what I don’t think he’d have done it like a shot if—no love lost between him and Miss Prince, you’ll have to admit, Strangeways.”

  “My dear good girl, there’s no love lost between myself and Mr. Billson, but we contrive not to murder each other.”

  Pamela Finlay opened her mouth for one of her usual bellows of laughter, then clapped her hand over it, and looked reproachfully at Nigel, as though he was to blame for the indiscretion. Nigel turned the subject to the day’s work and gave Miss Finlay some instructions. Presently he was on a bus, travelling eastward to the Bloomsbury thoroughfare off which lay Dickens Street.

  “So this is the love-nest,” he said to Superintendent Blount. “Well, what did I tell you?”

  “You’d been here before, maybe?”

  “Never.”

  “An astute guess of yours, then.”

  Nita Prince’s flat occupied the top floor of 19 Dickens Street. Below it, Nigel had noticed, were on the ground floor a solicitor’s office, and on the first and second floors the office of a small publishing firm. There was also a basement, where presumably a caretaker lived, for a dog had barked furiously from below as he climbed the stairs. Very convenient, he had thought, peering at the publisher’s discreet brass plate on the first-floor landing: this chap and the lawyer pack up at five or six in the evening, and after that the whole house is empty: no one to see who visited Nita, unless the caretaker is a busybody. Very convenient for Nita. Very inconvenient for Blount, though, possibly.

  The Superintendent had let him in.

  “Yes, you can touch anything. My fingerprint chap has been over the rooms,” were his first words. “This is the sitting-room. Bedroom and bathroom in there. Kitchen through that door. A homey little place.”

  Blount had said it. Nothing less like the film producer’s idea of a love-nest could be imagined. No seductive divans, no glittering cocktail cabinet, no wardrobe filled with slinky gowns, no signed photographs, no titillating multiplicity of mirrors. No glamour at all. Not even the stale waft of an exotic perfume in the air. If the rooms were stuffy at all, it was only with the stuffiness of an almost aggressive respectability. On the iron, four-poster bed lay a plain white satin night-dress, neatly folded. This note of severity was repeated on the dressing-table, which lacked the usual litter.

  “In vials of ivory and coloured glass

  Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

  Unguent, powdered, or liquid.” . . .

  Nigel found himself murmuring, as he eyed the plain wooden-backed hairbrushes, the business-like comb, the simple handkerchief-sachet smelling—of all things—of lavender. Nita’s beauty preparations he found tucked away at the back of a drawer. And, at the back of his mind, a new idea of Nita began to form—an idea about her and Jimmy which finally determined him to alter his last night’s resolution that he would not become further involved in the case.

  He wandered back into the sitting-room, absent-mindedly carrying a threadbare woolly rabbit which he had found on Nita’s bedside chair.

  “I find all this very pathetic,” he said to Blount, who was rummaging in the drawers of a bureau. He put down the rabbit on the mantelpiece, beside a briar pipe which lay there—Jimmy Lake’s, no doubt. “It only needs—well I’m blest, and here it is!” He picked up darning needles and yarn and a man’s sock from the seat of a chintz-covered armchair.

  “Quite a domesticated sort of lassie, you’d think,” said Blount. “But look at this, now.”

  He held out a sheaf of newspaper cuttings to Nigel. The top one revealed the dead girl wearing a bathing-dress and a photogenic smile, surrounded by a posturing, simpering bevy of nymphs. Underneath ran the caption: “Miss Nita Prince, eighteen-year-old winner of the Daily Clarion Seaside Lovelies Competition, with some other competitors.” The date of the paper was August, 1936.

  “I bet you found these tucked away at the back of a drawer, too,” said Nigel.

  “As a matter of fact, I did. What’s in your mind?”

  “Which drawer?”

  Blount pointed.

  “It was the only one locked. You’ll see why.”

  Nigel pulled the drawer right out from the bureau and laid it on the floor. He turned over the contents. Bundles of letters tied up with bright ribbons. A large foolscap envelope, out of which Nigel shook some photographs: these too revealed Nita Prince, but not this time in a bathing-dress. On the back of them was stamped: “Fortescue. Photographic Agency.”

  “You’ve noticed this, of course,” he asked.

  “Yes. She used to model for what they call Art Studies. Mr. Fortescue told me that himself.”

  “H’m. The body of a well-nourished young woman,” Nigel murmured. “What squalid phrases the police do use. Anything in the letters?”

  “I’m afraid the puir lassie was rather—e’eh, rather fast-living in her younger days,” replied Blount primly.

  “No recent letters, you mean?”

  “Well, there are a few notes from Mr. Lake. But nothing from Major Kennington. I doubt that’s a little strange, seeing she kept so much. And you’ll find a ribbon, same kind as those other ones, in the waste-paper basket.” Blount glanced significantly at Nigel. “A ribbon, but no letters to go with it.”

  “I see your point. But it’s rather odd that a person should take away his bundle of letters and leave the ribbon behind, isn’t it?”

  “People do silly things. That’s how stupid policemen catch up with them.”

  Nigel began to prowl round the room again. He paused at
a Matthew Smith still-life on the wall opposite the fireplace. His eye moved to the chintz covers and the deep maroon curtains, to the E.M.G. gramophone and the albums of records beside it—Beethoven Quartets, Mozart, Sibelius Symphonies, the Enigma Variations. Nita, or Jimmy, had been improving Nita’s taste. He moved over to the bookshelf. Yes, relegated to the bottom shelves were the romantic novelettes, the tattered film magazines, the detective novels of Miss Prince’s unregenerate days. Above them were ranged more serious reading: copies of the Everyman edition; a row of the English poets, with Jimmy Lake’s favourite Victorians bulking large; novels by E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Green.

  Nigel picked up a green-covered book lying on the table beside the armchair. “Poems by A. H. Clough, sometime Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford.” On the flyleaf, “N., with love from J., July 28, 1945.” Nigel turned to the pages between which the marker lay. A passage was marked in pencil—a line at the side of it, and an exclamation mark.

  “Terrible word, obligation! You should not, Eustace, you should not.

  No, you should not have used it. But oh, great Heavens, I repel it!

  Oh, I cancel, reject, disavow and repudiate wholly Every debt in this kind, disclaim every claim, and dishonour,

  Yes, my own heart’s own writing, my soul’s own signature! Ah, no!

  I will be free in this; you shall not, none shall, bind me.

  No, my friend, if you wish to be told, it was this above all things,

  This that charmed me, ah, yes, even this, that she held me to nothing.

  No, I could take as I pleased; come close; fasten ties as I fancied;

  Bind and engage myself deep;—and lo, on the following morning

  It was all e’en as before, like losings in games played for nothing.

  Yes, when I came, with mean fears in my soul, with a semi-performance

  At the first step breaking down in its pitiful rôle of evasion,

  When to shuffle I came, to compromise, not meet, engagements,

  Lo, with her calm eyes there she met me and knew nothing of it,—