Pattern of Murder

by John Russell Fearn

  Terry tightened his lips. There must be a way—!

  The news finished. The comedy came and went—

  Then an idea struck Terry. It smote him with cold, deadly certainty as he turned to the dimmer-wheel, which brought the six massive houselights into being. Vera was just stirring from her tip-up seat, preparatory to serving ices. At this moment Terry noticed something he had never observed before. Directly over the tip-up seat—or so it seemed from the angle of the projection room—was one of the houselights!

  A slow smile came over Terry’s face. He began to realize at last how Vera Holdsworth was going to die.

  * * * * * * *

  Beyond commenting on routine matters, Terry hardly spoke at all during the run of the feature picture. In the eighteen-minute periods when he was not running his machine, he wandered on to the fire escape and stood musing. A lot of factors had now to be taken into account. It looked—only looked—as though the rearmost houselight hung directly over the tip-up seat. Being fitted to the staircase panelling, the seat was separated from the nearest row of the audience by a distance of about nine feet to one side—the side opposite the tip-up seat—and about six feet on the other side, on which side the tip-up was fixed.

  That meant that if a houselight globe came down—the houselight globe—it would not hit any member of the audience, but it would hit Vera, dead on! It would kill her—if not immediately, then very quickly.

  Terry pressed finger and thumb to his eyes. His pulses were racing and his mouth felt dry. He had seen psychopaths on the screen many a time: he had never realized, nor did he even now, that they might have something in common with himself. Was it worth risking murder? Would it not be better to risk imprisonment for theft rather than try and kill the girl? But who would ever be able to prove that he had killed her? Nobody! Not even Scotland Yard, provided he worked cleverly.

  He had to have the cinema to himself. He had to explore and find out the facts of the situation. With this in mind he complained, when taking over the running of his machine again, that it had developed a fault.

  “Fault?” Sid repeated, and looked through his own porthole onto the screen. “Don’t see anything wrong with the picture.”

  “You’re not likely to. I think it’s the take-up that’s giving trouble,” and Terry kicked the bottom spool box significantly.

  “Well, it’s no surprise,” Sid said. “I’ve asked you often enough for replacements on those machines and you always fob me off. About time something did go wrong. Maybe we’ll get some action.”

  “I can soon fix it,” Terry said. “I’ll stay after the show tonight and have a go at it.”

  The show ended at 9:50 and Terry nodded a casual goodnight to Sid and Billy as they departed. He listened to their feet going down the stone steps—they did not use the fire escape after dark since it was too dangerous—heard the door slam at the bottom; then he went up into the projection room again and hung about for a while until he got the signal over the buzzer to kill the houselights. This he did, and knowing that by now Turner would be in his office Terry picked up the direct-extension phone and pressed the button.

  “Yes?” came Mark Turner’s voice.

  “I’m staying behind tonight, sir,” Terry said. “I’ve got trouble with one of the machines, and I must get it right for the matinee tomorrow. There might not be time in the morning with Billy having his day off.”

  “Up to you,” Turner responded, and rang off.

  Terry waited until everybody had gone, then he descended into the foyer and bolted the doors. If anybody returned and complained of being unable to enter he could always say that, being far away in the projection room, he had thought it wisest to bolt the doors—considering the burglary there had been.

  This done he went with a lighted torch down the smoky, hot abyss of stalls to the door at the right hand side of the stage. Beyond the doorway was a narrow, wood-walled passage. On one side of it was the one-time orchestra pit. He went past it to a cat ladder and climbed until he came to the huge false roof space between the cinema ceiling and the roof proper. The space here was twelve feet high and a switch brought a string of sixty-watt lamps into brilliance, illuminating an area of beams, plaster, and lath.

  On here were also the fan chambers, the water tanks, and the winches, which held the houselights. Terry walked along the thick plank, which led to the furthermost—backmost—lamp on the left.

  Carefully he disconnected the plug that put the lamp in circuit with the mains; then he released the winch-ratchet and braced himself. As he slowly allowed the winch handle to turn, the nine-stranded steel hawser cable holding the heavy lamp fixture creaked and twanged as the entire lamp descended into the Circle below.

  Practically from memory Terry knew that nine turns would bring the lamp to a halt. He was right. At the ninth turn the wire became slack as the lamp obviously rasped on something below. He fixed the ratchet, returned downstairs and sped into the Circle where he switched on the solitary cleaning light in the roof.

  The entire massive fixture had come to rest lopsidedly on the floor below the tip-up seat. Had the seat been down, instead of pressed back flat against the panelling, the light fixture would have been resting on it. And if somebody—Vera for instance—had been on the seat...!

  Terry’s gaze travelled the length of the steel wire to the wooden rose in the ceiling, through which the wire vanished to join the winch drum above. Thoughtfully, his gaze returned to the lamp and its heavy oxidized fixture.

  Now what? He had established beyond doubt that if the lamp—or any part of it—came down it would crash on top of Vera as she sat on the tip-up. There was a further established fact that the lamp in every particular was far bigger than a human head, so the chance of a misfire was almost impossible. Yet again there was the fact that Vera, owing to the handrail wedging on her back, was always forced to sit about eight inches away from the panelling. In a word, a sitting target. Provided she was seated on that tip-up seat, nothing could save her.

  Accident? Yes, accident!

  In that case the whole fixture must not come down because that would never look like an accident. The law would never accept the theory that a nine-stranded steel cable in perfect condition—checked every two months by the police department—had given way. Filing or hacksawing it would not do, either. For one thing it would leave traces that the forensic laboratory would be quick to identify; and for another there would be no way of determining when such a ‘doctored’ wire would snap. It must be at a time when Vera was on the seat—during a show.

  “The whole fixture’s definitely too much of a good thing,” Terry told himself. “What else have we?”

  As he knew, the globe was in two sections, two big hemispheres of exceptionally heavy opal glass, the lower hemisphere being heavier than the upper. The upper hemisphere was a fixture, sealed in by curved bands of oxidized metal. The lower half was held with three large turnscrews, the tips of which fitted under the lipped edge of the hemisphere. To remove the lower hemisphere the screws had only to be unthreaded and so lay bare the bulb and socket within.

  Turnscrews.... Terry went down on his knees and turned them gently. They were fairly easy to twist, as indeed they ought to be. They were not screwed too tightly for fear that the glass, extending from the bulb’s beat, cracked from lack of room.

  Turnscrews....

  If something could turn the screws without anybody being near them! If something could loosen them! If only one of them moved too far back, the lower half of the globe would come down. All three in alignment was the only thing that kept the lower half of the globe in place. For years Terry had insisted that they were dangerous fixtures.... That fact might be useful. If one did come down nobody could say he hadn’t issued a warning often enough.

  Bur how to make the screws turn...?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PATTERN FOR MURDER

  Terry pulled down the tip-up seat, sat on it, and lit a cigarette. He gave himself up to hard th
ought. One thing would turn them, and that was vibration. Vibration! He recalled that, during the war years, when the cinema had been in danger from bombs, the authorities had ordered that the turnscrews be secured with sealing wax so that anti-aircraft fire or bombing would not affect the screws. There had been the added order of wire netting to be fastened under the globes and up to the fixture itself to catch any globe fragments if splintered. These precautions had gone at the war’s end, but—

  Vibration would turn them. And since they could not turn any nearer the glass they would turn the other way—unravel along the thread—

  Vibration!

  Terry sat a long time before the dawn of an idea struck him, and that idea was born of a scientific fact. Up here, in the Circle, in a direct line with the backwardly-tilted loudspeakers behind the screen, the vibration travelled in a straight line. Technically speaking, the sound vibration was at its highest peak at the back of the Circle. Here! This spot! And around the houselight, when it was in its normal position. And also around the twin houselight on the other side of the ceiling.

  Bass notes!

  Bass notes reverberated with such force on the glass of the projection room portholes that the glass itself rattled sometimes. There was certainly an impact from the disturbed airwaves. But these of themselves would never be sufficient to move screws. It demanded a really high-powered sustained vibration until the screws, agitated by it, moved backwards along their threads because they could not press any farther forwards, until finally their grip on the globe lip slipped.

  Then—!

  Terry crushed out his cigarette and put the remaining half in his case. He trod the ash into the carpet. His misdirected, scientific mind was at grips with the problem now. This would be no blood-and-thunder crime but a skilful execution of scientific truth. A sustained vibration had to be produced and it had to come from the screen’s loudspeakers. And it had only to affect one houselight globe. This one.

  “As to that,” he mused, “the other globes are all fairly tightly fastened, and the weight of the lower hemisphere holds the screws firm. I doubt if vibration would shift ’em. But if on this one I loosened the screws until only a hair’s breadth separated them from the edge of the glass, I’d be all right. Since the vibrations must somehow be devised from the hall speakers, that means it can only operate when the cinema is dark and the houselights extinguished....”

  He thought for a moment. “In that case, I can loosen the screws to the very limit of safety. As the globe gets hot it will expand and the danger will be lessened. As it cools it will shrink and then the danger will return. The limit of coolness, according to my reckoning, will be about twenty minutes after the lamp has been switched off. That means we shall have got to the Fitzpatrick Travelogue in the programme. Ten minutes news and ten minutes comedy. Then, if a vibration could somehow be brought to bear, the cooled metal would be in its most ‘sympathetic’ state. Vibration would jar the screws over the hairline and—down she’ll come!”

  Terry felt his heart thudding with the intensity of his thoughts. He knew two things. He had got to loosen the screws to danger point—he even thought of oil and then abandoned the idea since oil would leave filmy traces—and the vibration, whatever it was to be, must happen when the Travelogue film was running. But how could a vibration be produced?

  For a long time he meditated, and arrived at no conclusion. At his rooms he had books on sound and supersonics, which embraced the entire field of audible and inaudible sound. Perhaps there might be an answer there. This was a scientific problem, utterly apart from the normal run of crimes. Something that nobody could ever solve once the thing was accomplished. If only he could work out the scientific theory struggling in the back of his mind for recognition, he had the practical side in his grasp. And he must work fast, before Vera could say anything.

  He left the Circle, returned to the false roof, and wound the houselight back into position. When he returned to the Circle to look at the globe there was no clue to show that it had been lowered, except for the fact that at the moment it was swinging like a pendulum. He waited until finally it became motionless, then he sat on the tip-up and stared directly above him. All he could see was the white circle of the lower hemisphere floating in the void like a pale moon, some fifteen feet above. Certainly it would not hit anybody in the audience when it came down.

  Shutting all further thoughts from his mind for the moment, Terry confined his attention to switching off lights and making preparations for departure. Then he unbolted the front doors, locked them again on the outside, and left the cinema.

  Mr. and Mrs. Gordon had gone to bed when he reached his rooms, but as usual a supper had been left for him and he prepared his own hot drink. As he ate and drank he studied the book he had brought from his collection upstairs. He read:

  The human voice varies between sixty and 1,300 vibrations a second, covering four and a half octaves....

  “Technically,” Terry muttered, chewing steadily, “the cinema sound varies between forty and fifty decibels. And that is the point. If I were to raise the sound for a moment it would only be a noise, not a vibration. Besides, it would be suspicious—suddenly making the sound higher for no apparent reason. That won’t do.... The thing is, the higher the pitch of the sound the greater the rate of vibration.”

  The higher the pitch, the greater the vibration. Terry stopped chewing. “Of course! And the highest range an average human ear can detect is 20,000 vibrations a second. Above that,” he mused, “is the supersonic range. Inaudible sound, but there just the same. Detectable by instruments but not by the ear—and the higher up the scale it is the more vibratory power it has. Suppose we had sixty to eighty thousand vibrations a second. What would we get then...?”

  He knew perfectly well what he would get—an inaudible but powerful vibratory wave, which, striking the loosened screws of the houselight globe, would undoubtedly make them turn in their threads. He sat with his supper forgotten, debating the beauty of the idea. Nobody would hear the sound, and yet it would be devastatingly effective. Or would it be too effective and shatter the glass of the globe—or perhaps both globes in line with the screen? That would ruin the whole thing. He could only tell by experiment....

  So the final and greatest problem of all: how to create a supersonic wave with the show running normally as well. Terry had gone to bed and been there for an hour, wakeful and brooding, before he began to grasp another technical fact culled from his long experience as a projectionist and sound engineer.

  “Some films,” he told himself, “produce a high-pitched sound, almost inaudible, in addition to the normally recorded track.”

  He had come across such films in his experience, films which, by some accident in processing, or carelessness in running, had had their sound tracks punctured with spaced dots at regular intervals along the side of the track itself. These punctures, racing through the sound gate at the film speed of ninety feet a minute, had produced a continuous high-pitched whine in the speakers, caused by the persistence of sound from one puncture to another, much the same as a stick swept along iron railings produces one metallic sound, instead of individual notes as each iron railing is momentarily struck.

  ‘Sprocket hum’, the curse of many a projectionist, might for once be turned to advantage. In Terry’s experience, the dots that had caused this intense high frequency note had been about an eighth of an inch apart. But suppose some were made much closer together on a reel of film? The nearer the punctures to each other the higher the pitch produced. It might be possible to get the dots so close to each other that the sound they made would soar into the supersonic range and become inaudible.

  The idea fascinated Terry so much he wanted to try it out immediately, but he checked the impulse. If by any chance he were caught at the cinema in the early hours of the morning his devotion to duty might appear a little over-zealous to say the least of it. So he stayed where he was.

  On the morrow the inquisitive Billy would be of
f for the day and Sid would be taking over the youth’s work—cleaning the projection room and the machines. During that time Terry decided he could satisfy himself on certain points. There was, he remembered, a Christmas carol film from last year’s festive season, which had ‘sprocket hum’, though not severe enough to interfere with the normal recording. He could measure the distance apart of the holes that caused the hum. If there was room, he could double or treble the number of punctures.

  How?

  Well, there were many small gear wheels in the junk pile in the winding room, some no bigger than a sixpence and perfectly cast with a multitude of fine, sharp teeth. All he had to do was fix a spindle through the wheel and secure it to a handle. Then he could run the wheel along the edge of the sound track, using strong pressure, as a cook might cut pastry with a wheeled pastry cutter. The teeth would leave perfect punctures at mathematically spaced intervals.

  Terry fell into a doze, absorbed with the technical side of the problem. That it was aimed at the cold-blooded murder of an unsuspecting girl, however unpleasant she might be, was furthest from his considerations....

  When he arrived at the cinema the following morning he found Sid in the winding room, mixing film cement. There was an over-powering odour of pear drops in the air.

  “I’ve a mind to go down and ask the boss how I stand,” Sid said, taking the subject of the burglary so much for granted he did not even bother to lead up to it.

  “Up to you,” Terry shrugged. “How much do you think you’ll get out of it, though? He won’t say anything unless he has proof. All he’ll do is stall. And if he’s come to the conclusion that you are the culprit your anxiety to find out the facts might be misconstrued as guilt. I’d let well alone if I were you.”