Pattern of Murder

by John Russell Fearn

  “Easy to talk,” Sid sighed. Then he puckered his big face somewhat. “Still, maybe you’re right.”

  Terry allowed a reasonable interval to pass whilst he mechanically put down entries in the film logbook. Then he turned.

  “You’d better get the box tidied up, Sid. Billy’s job for today, you know.”

  “Fair enough.” Sid lumbered out willingly.

  Terry waited until he could hear the heavy footsteps moving to and fro in the projection room above, then he began a search under the bench for the old and dusty film can which contained last season’s carol. He found it presently, took the 150-length of film from the tin—and listened. Sid was still busy above, and likely to be for a little while.

  Carefully Terry unwound the film until he came to the actual sound track. His recollection of it had been correct. At equal distances from each other, on the extreme outer edge, the track was punctured with holes. A measurement with a ruler satisfied him that the distance between each hole was about an eighth of an inch. He nodded to himself, put the film away again in the can, and then began to hunt around through the boxes of junk and spare parts until he found a suitable small-circumference gear wheel with a multitude of sharp teeth.

  To find a long piece of steel with a thread at one end was not difficult. In the vice he bent the threaded section for a length of about an inch at right angles, until the finished rod looked like a letter ‘L’. The base of the ‘L’ he pushed through the gear wheel’s central hole, and with a bolt and washer fitted it into position. An experiment on an old bit of film satisfied him that the device was perfect. With sufficient pressure the gear wheel left holes that almost touched each other.

  Terry’s urge now was to prepare the carol film for experiment, but he had to resist the temptation. Sid might come down at any moment: he must have no hint whatever. Terry decided that he could make his preparations at home during the dinner hour. For the moment he had done all he could—and if he was not to seem unusually busy down here he had better go up and join Sid. This he did, helping him in tidying the projection room and making preparations for the matinee.

  At lunchtime Terry left a few minutes after Sid and took the Christmas carol film with him, small enough to fit into his pocket. He hurried through his lunch and then, with an excuse, he went up to his bedroom. Here, using the marble top of the old-fashioned washstand, he unrolled the film and in fifteen minutes had punctured the sprocket-side of the tracks from end to end with his homemade perforator.

  So far, so good. He returned to the cinema ahead of Sid, put the carol film out of sight, and began normal duties. He would have to remain behind again tonight, and to build up to this he once more complained of machine trouble. Sid, completely unwary, again offered to stay—and once again Terry assured him there would be no necessity. As for Turner, he raised no objections.

  The ensuing hours were leadenly monotonous for both of them—for Terry because he wanted to get on with his task; for Sid because hoped-for information did not come. The matinee passed, the tea hour, and the evening show—and once again Terry found himself repeating the actions of the night before. He told Turner he was again working on his machine. Turner did not question it; he had not the technical knowledge to do so.

  Once more, as on the previous night, Terry waited until the building was deserted, then he went up into the false roof and lowered both the houselight over the tip-up seat, and its opposite neighbour. When he tried out his ‘punctured’ carol film he had to be sure that the houselight globes in a direct line with the screen speakers did not get the blast and crack in pieces.

  This task completed he went to the washroom and found an empty tumbler over the lavatory bowl. He slipped it in his pocket and next went up to the projection room. In a moment or two he had laced up the carol film. He set the curtains sweeping back from the screen and for a moment gazed out onto the greyness lighted by a single high cleaning light.

  He switched on the No. 1 projector but he did not use the arc. He did not need vision: only sound. Setting the sound-fader control at normal for the cinema he went out into the Circle and stood listening. Christmas bells were pealing out in all their glory, to the accompaniment of the ‘First Noel’. That former high-pitched hum which had been present had gone. This fact could only mean that his multiplication of punctures had raised the pitch of the hum into the inaudible. Taking the tumbler out of his pocket he placed it on his palm. Then he held it over his head.

  Nothing happened.

  His eye on the clock—the film would take about seven minutes to run through—Terry climbed on the back seat of the Circle and raised the tumbler to the limit. Still nothing happened. Either he was not in a direct line with the supersonic vibration or else the idea wasn’t feasible.

  He looked at the glass portholes. They were not cracked, so evidently the supersonic wave wasn’t affecting them either. His gaze moved round to the long-handled shovel standing in its clip amidst the fire-fighting hoses and sand buckets. He hurried over to it, pulled it forth, and then went up to the projection room with it.

  Switching off the projector he re-threaded the film to the beginning, and by this time had fixed a rough platform on top of the long-handled fire shovel. With the projector again running he returned to the Circle, put the tumbler on top of the shovel platform and raised it high in the air. When it had reached a point about eight inches above the level of the portholes it suddenly splintered and bits of glass came raining down.

  Terry dodged, grinning to himself. At that point, then, the supersonic vibration was in full blast, but missing all points below. He held the shovel’s long handle in position for a while longer, estimating the height. It was about at the point where the houselights would be when hanging in the normal position.

  “That’s it!” Terry breathed. “The point is, which will go first? The screws, or the glass of the globe? How am I to find that out?”

  He put the shovel down, picked up every bit of tumbler glass he could find, and then returned upstairs to switch off the projector and think the business out. He had arrived at a ticklish problem, and it was a problem that couldn’t be solved, either, without endangering the houselight globes. If one or both of them got broken in his endeavour to see if they would break, what then?

  There was also another point. Was the supersonic vibration as powerful in all directions at that height? If so, its direction could be altered by tilting the speakers at the back of the screen....

  Terry was commencing to realize he had still a long way to go. It was the recollection of a spare lower hemisphere globe in the winding room that set him off again. He got it, spent some time fixing up a rough device to hold the globe on top of his ‘shovel extension’, then with the projector once more running he returned to the Circle to experiment.

  Everywhere he raised the test globe nothing happened, even though he knew the supersonic vibration must be beating against it. At last the film came to an end with a dull bump from the speakers. Terry lowered his aching arm.

  “That settles it,” he muttered. “This opal glass is too tough to be shattered by a supersonic wave. Being half an inch thick it isn’t surprising. Okay, all I need now is a dress rehearsal.”

  He went upstairs and stopped the racing machine; then he came back into the Circle and screwed and unscrewed the turnscrews of the globe, which would hang over the tip-up seat. Oil he did not dare to use, but after working on the screws for several minutes he was satisfied that they moved up and down with perfect ease in their threads. This done, he loosened all three until only their very tips were holding under the globe rim.

  Returning to the false roof he hauled up both fixtures into place again—satisfied by now that the neighbour fixture would not be affected—and then he went into the staff room and gathered up a pile of dustsheets. These he bundled into a huge, bedlike mass round the tip-up seat beneath the hanging globe.

  Going back to the projection room he rewound the carol film and started it up yet again. W
ith keenly watching eyes he studied the globe slightly above his line of vision through the porthole. The film ran on for a minute and nothing happened. Two minutes— Three minutes. Terry found himself taut with expectancy, wondering if the whole idea was crazy anyway—

  Then, without a sound, the lower white hemisphere suddenly fell out of its fitting and dropped in the centre of the mass of dust sheets. Terry switched off, his legs shaking.

  It could be done—and, as he had calculated, the hemisphere’s weight was such that it did not deviate from a straight line in its downward drop. Had Vera been sitting there...!

  “It works! It definitely works!” Terry kept telling himself, over and over again. “And the time for the globe to cool to the point it is now means twenty minutes will have to elapse before the trouble starts. At that time we’ll be starting the Travelogue on this machine of mine.... Mmm, this has to be worked out.”

  He glanced at his watch. It was half past eleven. Obviously the carol film could not be used to produce the supersonic wave. Only the Fitzpatrick Travelogue could be used for that. It was, as he knew, a new copy with a perfect sound track. He could quite easily put punctures down the side of the track from start to finish with his ‘perforator’, and the effect produced when the film was run could not fail to be the same as that produced by the experimental carol film because the punctures would have the same spacing and the film would be moving at the same speed.

  “Tomorrow afternoon we shan’t be using the Travelogue,” Terry went on, thinking. “It’s the kids’ cowboy matinee. Tomorrow night will be the last run for the Travelogue. Then it will be stripped off and sent back to the renters. They’ll examine it before sending it off to another cinema and those perforations will then be found....”

  Therein lay the snag. The film renters would have a record of the film as perfect when sent to the Cosy Cinema, and damaged when received back. Even though the minute holes would not interfere with, the recording itself—as heard in the cinema—the film would no longer be classed as good copy. Attention would be drawn to the perforations. Then matters would work round to a difficult situation.

  “That’s a risk I daren’t take,” Terry told himself, looking at his machine absently. “There’s only one other way—deliberately ruin the sound track! Scratch it to blazes so the film can never be run again. That will mean the renters’ attention will be confined to the scratching, and the perforations, if noticed at all, will not even be mentioned. There’ll be hell to play, of course, and Turner will have to pay for the damage, but that can’t be helped.... Yes, that’s the idea! I can say that the machine I’ve been working on still isn’t right and that that is what must have caused the damage. Perfect! Ruin the film after we’ve run it for the last time. In that condition the film will be scrapped by the renters. They’ll get rid of the evidence, and not be aware of it!”

  The problem of how to deliberately ruin the film did not trouble him for a moment. All he had to do, when standing beside his machine, was to let the point of a needle scratch the track severely as the film ran out below the sound gate. If the film were ever run again it would be one mass of explosions, bangs, and interference.

  Terry’s mind was made up, but a rehearsal was still called for.

  He went into the winding room and, because Sid had done his job properly during the day the Travelogue film was duly wound back to the start. That meant it would not be examined again before being run at the show. Putting it on the winder, Terry wound it back to the finish, using his perforator all along the track on the sprocket side—the side that would be nearest to him when the film ran. This done, he wound the film back to start, took it up to his projector and laced it through, laying the carol film on one side for the moment.

  His next actions took him half an hour. He had to replace the hemisphere globe and haul it back into the ceiling. Then he went back to his machine, struck up the arc, and ran the Travelogue as he would at a normal performance. It had reached the halfway point, giving a view of a Technicolor bay on the screen, when the thing happened. The globe dropped, once again into the dust sheets.

  Terry switched off and calculated the time. At exactly five minutes to eight the following evening the globe would drop!

  In another couple of hours everything was ready. He had put the precariously screwed globe back in position, the turnscrew tips on the very edge of the glass rim. The dust sheets were back in the staff room, and curtains were redrawn across the screen, and the carol film burned to ashes and scattered to the night wind from the fire escape.

  The only thing Terry could not replace was the tumbler from the washroom, but he resolved to bring one next morning. The Travelogue was rewound and in the bin ready for the actual performance. As far as Terry was concerned Vera Holdsworth’s fate was settled, and his own position unassailable.

  CHAPTER SIX

  GLOBE OF DEATH

  At nine the following morning Terry arrived at the cinema looking hollow-eyed and strained about the mouth. He explained away his condition as being the beginning of a cold and spent most of the morning filled with a deep foreboding. Whilst he had been working out the problem in supersonics he had been happy: he had hardly glimpsed the underlying fiendishness of the motive for it all. Now he’d had the opportunity for more or less sober reflection he was frightened. Several times during the morning, as he worked beside Sid, he was more than once tempted to say it was time the houselights had a clean, and thereby get the chance to put the globe back to normal.

  No; things were too far advanced for that. The Travelogue film was perforated and ready. There was no reasonable excuse he could invent for leaving it out of the programme that night. The thing had to go on, and with this realization he steeled himself again.

  It had to be done. It was the only way to escape imprisonment, and anyway Vera was not the sort of girl whose being alive did anybody any good—except herself.

  It was after the children’s matinee, as Terry went across to the café for a cup of tea, that Helen Prescott caught up with him. He turned in surprise in the café doorway.

  “Why, Helen!”

  “Right!” she agreed, with a bright smile. “Do you mind? I eat, you know, same as other people.”

  Terry held the door open for her and they went across together to a corner table. Terry gave the order for both of them and then gave a questioning glance.

  “What’s the idea, Helen? Given up going home for tea?”

  “Not altogether, only my folks and sis are out a good deal, and there’s nothing I dislike more than having to eat alone.”

  Terry laughed a little. “It’s a wonder the boss doesn’t invite you to tea with him!”

  “That,” Helen said, her pretty face serious, “is why I’m here with you.”

  “Why me? I don’t get it.”

  “It’s simple enough. He’s aching to take me out to tea: he even said so. But somehow I— Well, it just doesn’t seem right. I’m only an employee after all, and he is the boss.”

  “Am I supposed to feel flattered?” Terry asked, and he had to wait for the tea to be laid out before he got an answer.

  “Maybe it’s a strange admission for me to make,” Helen said pensively, “but I really would give anything to know you better, Terry. You’re a decent chap to work with, and a good looker. I just can’t understand why I don’t seem to...to warm up to you, as it were.”

  “Easily explained,” Terry shrugged. “The boss is worth a few thousands and has some standing. I’m miles below him. That’s why you don’t warm up to me. No girl in her right senses would.”

  “Don’t make any mistake! Not every girl is out for what she can get! We’re not all like Vera Holdsworth, for instance.”

  Terry said nothing. He was watching Helen’s slender hands as she poured out the tea.

  “You’ve had a pretty bad experience with her,” she went on. “Naturally it has influenced your judgment with all girls—which isn’t exactly fair to either side. You surely don’t thi
nk I’m like her, do you?”

  “You couldn’t be,” Terry said. “But I don’t see why you have to tag along with me.”

  “Look, Terry, didn’t you say yourself we ought to make a go of it together?”

  “Yes.... But that was before I realized just how much the boss means to you.”

  Helen handed the teacup across. “You’ve got it all wrong, Terry. He doesn’t mean anything to me: it’s the other way round. But since he is the boss I have to take care what I do. Can’t bluntly refuse his advances, you know.”

  “If your affection is mainly for me you wouldn’t have any qualms about telling him to go to blazes,” Terry said frankly.

  “First I want to find out if it really is affection I have for you,” Helen said slowly, her eyes fixed on him. “You seem to have most of the things a girl looks for in a man, but— There’s a barrier somehow,” she added frowning. “I don’t know what it can be, either.”

  “Sounds crazy to me,” Terry growled.

  “I’m sensitive to people,” Helen explained. “I sort of know what they’re really like. I even find it annoying sometimes, when I want to like a person and yet just can’t because an inner sense keeps telling me to keep away. As far as the boss is concerned, I know that if I went overboard for him I’d end up as quite an influential wife, and he’d probably be a quiet, dead-level husband, never getting excited, and because of that a plain bore. With you there’s more fire and purpose—more imagination. But there’s also something else which I can’t get at.”

  Terry sighed and then went on with his tea. The girl’s next words gave him a shock.

  “You’ve something on your mind, Terry. Won’t you tell me what it is? I’ll help if I can.”

  For a long moment he looked at her as though she were a total stranger. He even felt half afraid of her.

  “Friends should help, shouldn’t they?” she insisted. “And there is certainly something worrying you. What is it? I can’t get at it.”

  “Do you have to?” Terry demanded roughly. “I’ve nothing on my mind except the burglary. I’m worried about that because I don’t know who’ll be nailed for it. It might even be me.”