The Doors Open

by Michael Gilbert

  “You’re speaking without the book,” said Lord Cedarbrook. “I know something about Legate because I’ve made enquiries. It’s true that his official position is managing director of the Stalagmite Insurance Corporation. A job which brings in a nominal salary of two thousand five hundred and seventy-five pounds a year – or very much less when the government has had its cut. But there’s more to it than that. Legate came into the public eye in 1932. His claim to fame was simply that he foresaw the ending of the 1931 slump about three months before anyone else in the City and had the courage to back his convictions in cash. At the time I’m speaking of he was a partner in a firm of stockbrokers, Moody and Van Bright–”

  Paddy stirred in his chair. He was on the point of making an observation so momentous that it might have changed the whole course of this narrative. Unfortunately, however, Lord Cedarbrook chose that moment to give vent to one of his most intimidating coughs, and Paddy relapsed into well-disciplined silence.

  “He not only acquired a good deal of money by his foresight – he also earned one of those enviable Lombard Street reputations which are born so silently and die so hard. He was talked about as ‘one of the greatest authorities on finance in the City’. He was ‘a good chap to watch’. His name became a byword in the markets. And I dare say he deserved a good deal of it. He’s certainly a very sound businessman. The Stalagmite wasn’t doing too well at the time. I expect they jumped at the idea of getting hold of a first-class man like Legate. He was probably able to name his own price. He’s certainly pulled up the Stalagmite’s turnover almost a hundred per cent in ten years. Very well, then. Is there anything in all that to suggest to either of you any convincing motive for a career of crime?”

  “What about earlier days?” suggested Nap, after some thought. “Before 1931.”

  “There’s nothing much doing there, either,” said Lord Cedarbrook, “though our information isn’t yet as full as I’d hoped it would be. He had a war record – of sorts. Enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in January 1915 – never got to France though. Transferred to the RASC and served in various home stations. Then he transferred again – to the Pay Corps this time. He got a commission in 1918 and was demobbed in 1919 and got a job with Buckley and Hobbs – his CO in the Pay Corps was one of their principals, I think – then joined another firm and worked his way up. He was a junior partner by 1931. Then, as I said, he came into his pile, and his name started to mean something.”

  “Even earlier, then,” said Nap. “He must be between fifty and sixty. That would make him – let’s see – about twenty-five when the 1914 war broke out.”

  “That’s one of the odd things about the man,” said Lord Cedarbrook. “He doesn’t seem to have any earlier history. All the facts I’ve been giving you were easy to come by – War Office records and friends in the City. But when you get back to January 1915 you run up against the wall. I’ve tried everything, and, quite honestly, I’m at a loss to know where to look next.”

  “His army records,” said Nap. “Don’t they give his name and place of birth and his parents and so on.”

  “They supply a great many facts,” said Lord Cedarbrook, “and those which I have been able to check are all, so far as I know, false. For instance, there was no one of the name of Legate registered at Somerset House on the day on which he states he was born, nor is there any record of the marriage of the persons stated to be his father and mother.”

  Paddy said, “I suppose he must have had some technical training. Have you tried the Institute of Chartered Accountants?”

  “Certainly, and every other professional body that keeps records.”

  “School, then,” suggested Nap.

  “That’s not so easy. But I can tell you another odd thing. If he did go to school – and I suppose he must have done – he seems not to have passed the School Leaving Examinations. The Joint Board and the Universities keep records and there’s no Legate in any of the likely years.”

  “You’ve certainly put some work in on this case,” said Paddy with enthusiasm.

  “Uncle,” said Nap, “there’s more in this than meets the eye. “What does Legate mean in your life?”

  “It’s funny you should say that,” said Lord Cedarbrook, “because until three days ago he meant nothing at all. He was just X, one of the unknowns in your puzzle. I investigated his past as thoroughly as I could, because when I take on a job it amuses me to do it properly. Then, three days ago, an odd thing happened. I called at the Stalagmite, on a pretext, and saw Mr Legate. And I recognized him. You see, I’d seen him once before, a long time ago.”

  If his listeners were expecting a dramatic revelation at this point, then they were disappointed. Lord Cedarbrook added simply, “I can’t for the life of me remember where.”

  “I’m always imagining I’ve seen people before,” said Paddy helpfully. “I remember once in Tunisia in 1943–”

  “You will excuse me for correcting you,” said Lord Cedarbrook, “I did not say I imagined I had seen him before. I said that I had seen him before. My mind is quite a reliable instrument–” The look which he directed at Paddy as he said this was more pointed than kind. “It informs me that I have seen Mr Legate before and supplies this additional information. The occasion was in some way connected with the sound of musical instruments, the feeling of water running down the back of my neck and the smell of anaesthetics.”

  “You only saw him on one single occasion. I connect it also, though, with a photograph I saw afterwards in the papers,”

  “A public occasion, then. Was it in the open air? I mean, it sounds rather like an open-air band concert, and someone fainting in the crowd.”

  “Except that there is very rarely such a big crowd at an open-air band concert – and if it was raining it would hardly be hot enough for people to faint.”

  “What about a flower show, or a gymkhana,” said Paddy, “A big crowd of people jammed together in a leaky marquee.”

  “Or wait,” said Nap, “Why should the water be rain at all? You’ve done a lot of boxing, haven’t you, Uncle?”

  “Of course,” said the old man – speaking on behalf of a tougher generation.

  “Right, then. Here’s the picture. You’re lying flat on the ground. The voice of a thousand harps is ringing in your ears. One of your seconds is trying to revive you by shoving a wet sponge down the back of your neck. The other is waving a bottle of smelling salts under your nose.”

  “Quite so,” said Lord Cedarbrook. “And where does Legate come in? Was he the referee?”

  “The photograph you mentioned,” said Paddy. “Was it a photograph of the occasion or a photograph of Legate himself?”

  “My recollections of the photograph are even slighter than my recollections of the event. But I think the photograph was some sort of a scene in which Legate was recognizable.”

  “Some sort of group? A regimental reunion? A house party?”

  “One of those candid camera things in a night club–?”

  “I don’t think we shall ever get at it by wild and haphazard guessing. The field is too wide. If the photograph was a press photograph – and I think it was – then there is a chance of tracing it.”

  “There’s a chance,” said Nap dubiously. “But how on earth would you set about it?”

  “I shall go down to Fleet Street,” said Uncle Alfred, “and I shall work my way through. I propose to start at the Daily Record, where I know the Sports Editor. The Press never throw away a photograph–”

  “All the same, it’s going to be a devil of a job, isn’t it? You’ve got a choice of at least fifty papers and a period of about fifty years to cover.”

  “You exaggerate the difficulties. I shall limit my research to the fifteen years between 1910 and 1925. If this thing had happened before 1910 Legate would have been so young that I should hardly have recognized him, and if it happened in the last twenty years I should certainly have been able to remember the details. Also, the field isn’t quite as wide
as you suggest. Only the top-flight newspapers take their own news pictures. The others all get them from half a dozen agencies.”

  “Well, I wish you luck,” said Nap.

  Uncle Alfred was nothing if not a worker, and his contacts in Fleet Street were many and fruitful. Two days later he turned up at Nap’s rooms in the evening. His massive shoulders were drooping and his eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue.

  “I never knew there were so many damned silly things you could take a photograph of,” he grunted as he lowered his great frame into Nap’s best chair. “Do you know what the ’20s thought about? Racing motorists, bathing belles and trunk murders. The Prince of Wales, Test Matches and the yo-yo. Short skirts and Suzanne Lenglen, the Bunnyhug and the Beggars’ Opera, Mussolini and the Immortal Hour.”

  “Have some whisky,” said Nap.

  “Certainly,” said Lord Cedarbrook, “and not much water. I start on the Daily Mirror tomorrow.”

  Three days later Lord Cedarbrook appeared again, drank the remainder of Nap’s whisky, and went to sleep in front of the fire. When roused in time to catch the last train home he said cryptically, “Damn all legs.” Nap gathered that he had been working through the illustrated Sunday papers.

  Then at last – it was a Friday evening – the telephone rang again and Nap heard his uncle’s voice, hoarse with a mixture of fatigue and suppressed triumph.

  “Is Carter with you?”

  “Paddy – no. But he’s due back any moment.”

  “Hold on to him when he does come. I’ve got something to show you.”

  Half an hour later Lord Cedarbrook, Nap and Paddy were poring over a photograph. It had a date inset 18.7.11, and was faded by time but still tolerably clear.

  “I found it in the GS Amalgamated files,” said Uncle Alfred, “among a lot of stuff they took over from an outfit called ‘Topical Shots’ which went into liquidation in 1920. The trouble is, there’s nothing on the records to show what paper it was actually published in. ‘Topical Shots’ were a tuppenny-ha’penny little agency who employed two men and a boy and lived from hand to mouth selling news photographs like this to anyone who’d pay for them.”

  “The eighteenth of July, 1911,” said Paddy. “That’s a long time ago.”

  “Quite so,” said Lord Cedarbrook. “I wonder how these things occur to you.”

  “It looks like Hyde Park,” said Nap hurriedly. “The north end, by the Marble Arch.”

  “Right,” said Lord Cedarbrook. “As soon as I saw the photograph I remembered it. That very hot summer in 1911. I had just got home from America. We’d been having a heatwave in New York and London wasn’t all that much cooler. There was some sort of trouble in the Park. A communist rally bumped up against the police and some heads were broken. That sort of thing was rare enough in those days to make headlines. A lot of people thought that the police had used their truncheons too soon and too hard. I was there, but I wouldn’t like to swear to the rights and wrongs of it. You know how it is in a crowd. Then, just as tempers on both sides were flaring, and almost anything might have happened – the floodgates of heaven were opened and down came the blessed rain. A summer thunderstorm. It cooled everyone off marvellously, and ten minutes later the crowds had passed on and there was nothing but a few couples strolling about, listening to the band, which had been patiently playing selections from Ruddigore, in the bandstand opposite the gate, throughout the disturbance. The only signs of strife were the St John’s Ambulance men attending to the casualties–”

  Nap, who was looking at the photograph through a reading glass, said, “That man on the grass is Legate, not a doubt of it. Who’s that chap bending over him? He doesn’t look like an ambulance man.”

  “I think he was a doctor. There was a doctor in the crowd, who helped the first-aid people.”

  “Was Legate one of the communists?” asked Paddy incredulously. “He didn’t look much like a Bolshy to me.”

  “It’s marvellous what material prosperity will do for a man’s political convictions,” said Lord Cedarbrook drily.

  “Yes, but was he?” said Nap. “I mean, he might have been a member of the crowd who had got knocked over in the rush.”

  “Well, he might have been,” said Lord Cedarbrook, “but it was my impression that he had been taking some part in the proceedings.”

  Again a thought, a vague idea, stirred in the depths of Paddy’s mind like a sluggish trout in a summer pool.

  Again he said nothing.

  “The real question is,” said Nap, “where do we go from here?”

  “To bed,” said His Lordship. “I don’t know about you two, but I’ve got some sleep to make up.”

  It was three evenings later that Lord Cedarbrook arrived unannounced followed by a pale youth, staggering under the weight of what looked like a laundry basket.

  “Put ’em down there,” he said. “I’ll settle up by cheque in the morning.”

  “Very good, my Lord.”

  “Now you’re going to do some work for a change,” said Lord Cedarbrook, as he unstrapped and threw open the wicker lid.

  “Golly, what a collection,” said Nap. “Where did you get them from, uncle?”

  “A press-cutting agency. You’ll find in there at least one copy of every paper that was published in the week following that incident in Hyde Park. Some of them probably refer to it. I thought we might get some information – particularly about the victims. Or we might find the name of that doctor! It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that he’s still alive. He was quite a young fellow.”

  Paddy and Nap drew out an armful each and they started to spread papers, periodicals, magazines large and small, slim and fat, over the tables and, when all the tables were full, over the chairs too, and in long lines across the floor.

  “Arrange ’em in groups,” said Lord Cedarbrook. “Daily papers, comics, technicals–”

  “Provincials on the hearthrug,” said Nap, “and parish magazines under the sideboard.”

  They sorted for ten minutes in silence, and when they had finished the room looked like a journalist’s nightmare.

  The agency had done its work with marvellous efficiency. White, pink, yellow and greenish, a cross-section of the country’s forgotten newspapers covered every inch of the room, filling the air with the peculiar, musty smell of stale paper.

  “I say,” said Paddy with a chuckle, “rather a crude sense of humour they had in those days, don’t you think.” He was studying the pages of a pink periodical devoted to the Turf and the Stage [well-known to the Edwardian smoking-room, but now mercifully extinct].

  “I should confine your researches,” said Lord Cedarbrook coldly, “in the first instance, to the daily press of London. After that, the provincial dailies. The humorous periodicals offer, on the whole, a less promising field for enquiry.”

  They passed a hectic evening.

  “I refuse to believe,” said Paddy, “that there can ever have been much of a circulation for a paper called The Rodent-Catchers and Vermin-Destroyers’ Weekly–”

  “Just listen to what the Vicar of St Hildegarde’s has to say about Suffragettes,” said Nap.

  “Lord,” said Uncle Alfred, “here’s a photograph of Flossie Carmichael. I remember that girl falling off a punt at Henley in 1908 and ruining the finish of the Ladies Plate.”

  Nap broke up the session by announcing that it was three o’clock.

  The following night they fell to again and shortly after midnight they had finished. They found that they had acquired a comprehensive knowledge of life as it was lived in the opening years of the reign of his late Majesty, King George the Fifth – but very little else.

  Most of the London papers had given some prominence to the happenings in Hyde Park. It was referred to as ‘The Hyde Park Incident’ – or, in the Leftist papers as ‘The Hyde Park Scandal’ – and was even honoured by a short and reasonably impartial summary in the columns of the old Thunderer himself.

  “A Procession formed of
disaffected workmen” – (the papers in that year of grace, they noticed, were less mealy-mouthed when discussing trade union activities) – “drawn principally from engineering works in the area of Charlton and Deptford, yesterday staged a rally and demonstration in Hyde Park. Police reinforcements were called out, and the clash which ensued resulted in a few minor casualties – less, probably, than the organizers had hoped for. One woman was knocked down by the horse of a mounted policeman which got out of control and a few of the demonstrators suffered slight injuries. No ambulances were called out and no one was detained.”

  “All very well,” grumbled Nap, “but what about a few names.”

  Nobody, however, had apparently thought it of interest to note the names and addresses of the victims. The personal touch in journalism had not then come into vogue. It was the age of the Common Man.

  “No ambulances were called out,” said Lord Cedarbrook thoughtfully. “That makes it a waste of time to try hospital registers – even if they went back as far. Blast that policeman. Why couldn’t he have hit him a bit harder.”

  “Always supposing it was Legate he hit,” said Paddy.

  “And always supposing Legate was one of the communists – not just an innocent bystander.”

  The warning light flickered again in Paddy’s brain: this time it was heeded.

  “I meant to mention this before,” he said slowly. “I think Legate was a communist. Or, at any rate, I think he sympathized with them.”

  “What on earth makes you say that, my boy?”

  “It’s just this, sir. The first time I saw Legate, right at the end of my interview, I made some silly crack about communism – not meaning anything in particular. You know – just for the sake of saying something, and I remember that I caught the tail end of a rather dirty look from Legate. It didn’t connect at the time, but thinking back, I’m sure he was bloody annoyed.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Not a word. It was just a sort of – well – as I said – a bit of a tired sort of look.”

  “Well,” said Nap, “unless you imagined the whole thing, it means that he must still be a communist. It rather knocks your theory, Uncle, that he was a Red when he was poor but has turned True Blue now that he’s acquired some shekels. I mean, you wouldn’t get all hot under the collar just because a chap said something derogatory about a party you’d belonged to twenty-five years ago and tried hard to forget ever since. But even so, I can’t quite see what it all adds up to. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, but without even being certain that it’s a needle that you’re looking for.”