Falling Star

by Patricia Moyes

  “I want to talk to you,” said Henry—“about Margery Phipps.”

  “You’ve already done that,” I said. “I’ve told you all I know, which is very little. Really, there’s no need to come and disturb the whole unit, simply because some idiot of an old woman from Lewisham…”

  Henry interrupted me. “Last time we met,” he said, “I promised to show you a copy of the note that Margery left for her mother. Somehow I forgot. I’ve brought it for you to see today.”

  “I’m not very interested,” I said. “Apparently the coroner was satisfied. There seems no reason why I should read it.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Henry, “I’d be grateful if you would.”

  He handed me a paper. It was a photostatic copy of a letter. I recognized Margery’s handwriting without difficulty; it had been a large and distinctive hand, with widely looped letters.

  “I am sorry I have to take this step. I sincerely feel that it is the only thing. There is no need to tell you the reasons, Dear.” At the bottom, it was signed with one word—“Margery.”

  “Well?” said Tibbett.

  “Well, what?” I answered. “This seems a perfectly ordinary suicide note to me. What else did you expect her to say in it?”

  “It was on the table in her apartment,” said Henry, “in an envelope addressed to Mrs. Cyril Phipps. The envelope was typewritten on Margery’s typewriter.”

  “Well?” I said again.

  “Doesn’t anything strike you as—unusual—about that note?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing.”

  “When you compare it,” said Henry, in that almost diffident way he has, “with the other note I told you about, the one to her real mother, the style is so entirely different.”

  “That’s not surprising,” I said. “One was to her real mother, and the other to her foster mother. And then, I dare say, she wasn’t worrying too much about literary style when she was about to jump out of a seventh-story window. In any case,” I added, “I can reassure you on one point. That’s certainly Margery’s handwriting.”

  Henry gave me an odd, sharp look. “Yes,” he said. There was a pause.

  I looked at my watch. “Well,” I said, “if you’ll forgive me—and if you’ve seen all you want to—I think I ought to be getting back to work. My office doesn’t run itself, you know.”

  “I haven’t quite finished yet,” Tibbett said. “Tell me, did you ever receive a letter from Miss Phipps, written in her own handwriting?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Her letter of resignation was handwritten. That’s why I was able to recognize her writing at once.”

  “Where is that letter now?” Henry asked.

  “In the appropriate file in my office, of course,” I said, with some impatience. It seemed to me that Tibbett’s questions were getting more and more futile.

  “If you’re going back there now,” he went on, “perhaps I might come with you. I’m rather interested in seeing that letter.”

  I could hardly refuse without seeming churlish, although the last thing that I wanted was Henry Tibbett rooting around in my office among my private papers. I did not like the turn that things were taking.

  “I’ll send my car away and ride with you, if I may,” said Henry. “I don’t want to give your office a bad reputation.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I just thought you might prefer not to have a police car parked outside.”

  “Look here,” I said, with a certain amount of heat, “just what is going on? Are you here on official business or aren’t you? What authority have you to demand to look at the firm’s private correspondence?”

  I suppose my voice must have risen more than I intended, for Gervase Mountjoy, who was as usual reading a newspaper, looked up and gave both of us a long, hard stare as we walked past, and I saw Amy, the hairdresser, whisper something to Anton and giggle.

  I went on in what was little more than a whisper. “If this is a police investigation, we surely have a right to be informed officially. Just because I happen to have met you socially, that’s no excuse for trading on our acquaintance in order to…”

  Henry laid a hand on my arm. “Mr. Croombe-Peters,” he said, “I do appreciate your point of view. Believe me, my only object in approaching you unofficially is to cause you and your colleagues the least possible embarrassment and inconvenience.”

  “If you’d just explain,” I began.

  “I’ll explain soon enough,” he said, and then fell silent. In fact, he scarcely opened his mouth while we were in the car. I found a free parking meter close to the office, and we went up in the lift together. As we walked through the outer office, where Sylvia sits with her typewriter and files, I said to her, “Oh, Sylvia. Look out Margery Phipps’s letter of resignation and bring it in to my office, will you?”

  I ushered Tibbett into my office, closed the door behind us, and offered him a chair. Then I sat down at my desk, lit a cigarette, and said, “I suppose it’s your job to make mysteries out of perfectly ordinary events, but it seems to me you’re carrying it a bit far this time. What on earth is on your mind?”

  Instead of replying to my question, Henry said, “Can you remember offhand what Margery said in that letter?”

  “Nothing very much. Just that she was sorry that for personal reasons she would have to resign her job. A very typical letter—short, concise, and to the point. You’ll see it in a moment.”

  The door opened and Sylvia came in. She’s a calm little person as a rule, and extremely efficient, and I could see at once that she was upset about something. “Mr. Croombe-Peters,” she said, “I—I’m terribly sorry—if you can wait just a moment…”

  “I rather imagine that Sylvia can’t find the letter,” Henry said. He grinned encouragingly at Sylvia, who smiled back as if relieved to have found an ally.

  “I just can’t understand it,” she said, more to Henry than to me. “I know I filed it the day it came in, but it’s not there. The only thing I can think of is that Mr. Potman’s secretary must have borrowed it for the address or something. I’m just going along to ask her now. I mean, it can’t just have disappeared, can it?”

  “By all means ask,” said Henry, “but I doubt if you’ll find it. It’s all right,” he added, rather quickly, “it’s not your fault, Sylvia. Run along now and see if you can locate it anywhere in the offices.”

  Sylvia vanished, still red in the face and thankful to escape.

  Henry turned to me. “This is just what I expected, and feared,” he said.

  “I don’t see what…”

  “Just supposing, Mr. Croombe-Peters,” said Henry, “that for some reason you wanted to forge a note in someone else’s handwriting. Not being an expert forger, how would you set about it?”

  “I—what a preposterous idea. Why should I want to forge anything?”

  “My question,” said Henry blandly, “was purely hypothetical. How would you set about it?”

  “Well—I suppose I’d try to get hold of a specimen of the person’s handwriting and copy it.”

  “Do you think that would deceive anybody?”

  “That,” I retorted with a certain amount of sarcasm, “would depend on my skill as a forger, wouldn’t it?”

  “Forgery,” said Tibbett, “is a highly specialized craft; you could almost call it an art. I very much doubt if you, as an amateur—and I’m assuming you are an amateur—would be able to produce anything that would pass muster. Can’t you think of a better way?”

  “No,” I said shortly, “I can’t.” I could see the trend of his questions and I did not like it.

  “In your position,” Tibbett went on, “I would try to get hold of some fairly long document handwritten by the person in question—a letter, for instance—and then compose my forged note entirely of words and phrases which occurred in that letter. In that way, instead of copying I could actually trace complete words and sentences. You see, most forgeries are given away by the lack of flow with
which the individual letters are put together. Do you agree with me that it would be a pretty ingenious idea to do as I’ve suggested?”

  “I think it would be nonsense,” I said.

  Tibbett put a hand into his breast pocket and brought out Margery’s suicide note again. “Well,” he said, “you may not think much of the idea, and maybe you’re right; but it was undoubtedly the method used to forge this. Or so our experts say.”

  “Are you trying to tell me…?”

  “Margery Phipps,” said Tibbett, “did not write this. It is an amateur but quite competent piece of forgery. Normally, of course, a suicide note isn’t subjected to the scrutiny of handwriting experts, and this particular piece of trickery would almost certainly have passed unnoticed if it hadn’t been for the fact that Mrs. Arbuthnot had roused my interest sufficiently to make me take a second look at it. Quite apart from the difference in style between this and the letter that Margery wrote to her real mother, it struck me, on a more careful reading, that this note was composed of the sort of phrases which would be likely to occur in a business letter—‘to take this step,’ ‘There is no need,’ ‘Dear,’ ‘sincerely,’ and so forth.” He paused.

  I said nothing.

  “So,” Tibbett went on, “I visited Margery’s apartment yesterday, and had a bit of a hunt around among her things. I told you before that our people found very little in the way of personal papers, and nothing whatever to connect Margery with Northburn Films; but I had a good idea of what I was looking for, and sure enough, by great good luck, I found it.”

  “Found what?”

  “This,” said Henry. He extracted a folded sheet of paper from his wallet. “It’s almost certainly a draft copy of her letter of resignation. I’d like you to read it, and tell me if it corresponds to the one which your secretary has so carelessly mislaid.”

  I unfolded the paper without enthusiasm. It had no superscription, and several words had been crossed out and others substituted.

  I am sorry to have to tell you that, for personal reasons, I am compelled to resign my position as from today. I regret that I have to take this step as I have enjoyed working on Street Scene, but I am afraid that it is the only thing I can do. I am enclosing two weeks’ salary in lieu of notice, and hope you will feel that this arrangement is satisfactory. If you agree, there is no need for any further correspondence between us.

  Reluctantly I said, “Yes, that is certainly a draft of the letter she sent to me.”

  “You will notice,” said Tibbett, “that every phrase in the so-called suicide note occurs in that letter, with the exception of the words ‘Dear’ and ‘sincerely,’ which presumably were in the final copy.”

  “That’s all very well,” I said, “but what about the envelope addressed to Mrs. Phipps?”

  “What about it, indeed?” Henry echoed. “If you remember, I told you that it was typewritten; that was another inconsistency which made me think.”

  “Typewritten on Margery’s own machine,” I pointed out.

  “Yes,” said Henry. “And the typewriter was in Margery’s flat. It was a very audacious and cool-headed bit of work. We don’t know whether the apartment was broken into and the envelope prepared beforehand, along with the note, or whether the person in question actually had the effrontery to sit down and type the envelope after…” He stopped.

  “After what?” I asked. My throat felt curiously dry, and my voice sounded to me like a sort of croak.

  “After Margery had been murdered,” said Henry.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THERE WAS a tingling silence. I suppose I had known all along what Tibbett was going to say, but it still gave me a numbing shock to hear the actual words. I was as incapable of speech as if I had just fallen through thin ice into a freezing pool—literally, physically breathless. Then I became aware that Henry was smiling easily, sitting back comfortably in his chair, and I made a tremendous effort to concentrate on what he was saying.

  “…could have had access to the files?” he ended, on a note of interrogation.

  “I—I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “I was asking you who could have got at that file?”

  “I don’t know. Anybody. Things here aren’t treated as top secret, you know.” I took a cigarette, and it seemed to steady me.

  “I’m still very much in the dark over the case,” said Henry.

  It made my blood curdle to hear him use that word, with all its associations of investigations, questionings, clues, dossiers, scientific experiments, fingerprints—and then the arrest, the trial, the verdict, the sentence. I forced myself to listen again.

  “One thing that seems obvious,” Henry was saying, “is that the murderer was in some way connected with Northburn Films, firstly, because an outsider could hardly have taken the letter, and secondly, because of the deliberate removal from Margery’s flat of any papers connecting her with the company. That gives me a very narrow field to work in.”

  “What do you mean, a narrow field?” I asked. “There are more than fifty people in the unit, one way and another, counting the principal actors. You must have seen that for yourself today.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Henry, “but most of them have perfect alibis.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Margery Phipps was killed at seven minutes past four last Tuesday afternoon,” said Henry. “She fell to her death in full view of several people who were walking in Dredge Street. They naturally assumed that she had jumped from the window. In fact, in the words of the old song, she didn’t fall, she was pushed— by somebody who was in that apartment with her. Naturally, there was pandemonium in the street below, and it was quite some time before it was established who she was and just which apartment she came from. Plenty of time for the murderer to slip quietly out of the building by another door. The wretched place has no less than four exits, all leading onto different streets, and, of course, all the staff had come rushing out into Dredge Street to gape at the disaster. Do you know the place, by the way? Chelsea Mansions?”

  “I know it from the outside, of course,” I said. “A monstrosity, an artistic abortion in dirty concrete.”

  “I’m not competent to judge it architecturally,” Henry said, with a slight smile, “but it’s a detective’s nightmare. A rabbit warren with more than four hundred flats in it, and, as I said, four separate entrances. The main foyer is always full of tenants and visitors coming and going, and there’s only one porter on duty. Even so there might have been a faint hope that he’d have been able to pick out a familiar face among your people; but, of course, he was called at once and went rushing round to Dredge Street, which is the little road at the back of the building. All the murderer had to do was to come down in the lift, mix with the crowd in the foyer, and walk out. The only risk was of meeting somebody on the seventh-floor corridor, but it was a remote one. Margery’s flat is just opposite the lift.”

  “You said that most of our people had alibis,” I remarked. “What did you mean by that?”

  “Simply,” said Henry, “that nobody can be engaged on shooting a film in a disused Underground station in the City—as I believe you were that day—and simultaneously be pushing young ladies out of windows in Chelsea. The technicians and actors who were actually on the set are in the clear. The same goes for anyone who was working here in the office all the afternoon, and can prove it. That leaves us with the members of the unit who tend to…move about from one place to another.”

  He was looking at me curiously now, and I felt a sudden surge of real anger. How dared he pick on me like that? Anger brought warmth, and with warmth came common sense. The numbness had passed, and I was able to lean back and give as good as I was getting in the matter of slow looks and quizzical smiles.

  “My dear Tibbett,” I said, “I am afraid that you are very badly informed. What can our much-vaunted police force be coming to?”

  His face did not change, but I could sense that he was annoyed. “Badly informed?” he
said. “About what?”

  “About the movements of the members of this unit.”

  “Your secretary told me on the telephone this morning…”

  “Doubtless,” I said, punctuating the words with puffs as I lit a cigarette, “you asked Sylvia where the unit had been operating on the day in question, and she told you—quite correctly—that our location had been the Underground station. What she did not tell you—because you did not ask—was that we finished early. In fact, the unit broke up for the day soon after half-past eleven, and everyone went their separate ways. So, you see, any of us could have been at Chelsea Mansions at seven minutes past four.”

  “Oh, hell,” said Henry. He said it so simply and with such obvious dismay that I could not help smiling. When he wished, he had the same disarming straight-forwardness as Sam Potman. There was a little pause, and then he said, “Any of you?”

  “Well, now you come to mention it, no. Rushes were shown at four o’clock in the private cinema in the basement here, but they weren’t very well attended. The only people there were Sam Potman, Fred Harborough, the cameraman, and the Continuity Girl, Diana. And, of course,” I could not resist another quizzical smile, “yours truly.”

  “So,” said Henry, “anybody else on the unit could have…?”

  “Precisely,” I said.

  There was a short silence. Then Henry said, “I’m going round to Chelsea Mansions after lunch. Would you care to have a bite to eat and then come along there with me?”

  “I’m rather busy this afternoon.” I said. I had a feeling that it sounded unconvincing.

  “I wish you would,” Henry said. “You might be able to help me a great deal.”

  My instinct was to refuse, but then a small warning bell seemed to sound at the back of my brain. If this were going to develop into an unpleasant affair, it would look very bad if Northburn Films had not co-operated up to the hilt right from the beginning.

  “I’ll come,” I said.

  We had a quick lunch of cheese and sausages in a nearby pub, during which Henry did not mention Margery Phipps at all but spoke about his wife, Emmy, her prowess as a cook, and the delicious recipes she had brought back from their summer holiday in Spain. I listened as politely as I could. At half-past two, we took a cab to Chelsea.