‘Keep it, Mr. Strangeways. We’ll have a proper chat soon. Going back to those staple-marks— sYes, what is it, Summers?’
The inspector was drawn aside by one of his men. Nigel took the opportunity to inspect the table where the dead woman had worked. The pile of typescript was still there, and a sheet in the machine. Millicent Miles’s career had been ended, it seemed, in mid-sentence. Nigel bent closer, something catching his eye.
‘Wright, have you finished with this machine?’
‘It’s all yours.’
The door opened. Men came in with a stretcher. After the body had been lifted on to it and carried down to the ambulance, Nigel did a little typing; then he beckoned to the inspector.
‘See? That’s where she left off typing. And that’s where I began. It’s out of alignment.’
Wright’s eyes sparked with intelligence. ‘Someone took out the sheet of paper, then put it back later? She could have done it herself, mind you.’
‘She could have. If she didn’t, the murderer had some typing to do himself. That’s what he needed time for. That’s why he stapled the window. Now why did he have to use a typewriter?’
Chapter 8
Lower Case
LATE THAT NIGHT, on Nigel’s invitation, Inspector Wright was supping with him at Boulestin’s. It was a silent meal, for both men were reading. Nigel had spent the afternoon, while Wright and his detective-sergeant were interviewing members of the firm, in typing out a full account of his investigation of the libel affair. It was this that the inspector was now reading, as he wolfed a delicate saddle of hare and Nigel studied the results of the police interviews.
From the latter, it was evident that Wright had thrown his net over the period between 4 p.m. and midnight on Friday. At about four, according to the girl on the switchboard, Miss Miles had put through a telephone call: the police had checked this call: it was to her hairdresser. Stephen Protheroe was vague as to when she had opened the window for a word with him—thought it would have been about 4.30 but couldn’t be sure: so it was safer to assume 4 p.m. as the last time when she was known to be alive. Inquiry into Miss Miles’s habits showed that she normally left Wenham & Geraldine at about 6 p.m.; but occasionally, according to her German maid, she had worked later, not returning home sometimes till 8 o’clock. However, unless she had made an appointment with the murderer for a meeting in the office late that night (and why at the office if it was to be so late?), the natural deduction was that she must have been killed before 6 p.m. The murderer would hardly have based his plans on the chance that he would find her still at work later than this. Besides, the clue of the staple-marks pointed to a period when there were still people in the office and the murderer might be spotted with the body.
There was one other time-pointer in Inspector Wright’s report. He had interviewed Susan, the forward blonde of the Reference Library. Susan had heard no suspicious sounds from the next-door room that Friday afternoon: leaving at 5.30 sharp, she had heard ‘Miss Miles typing away like mad,’ as she passed her door. Now this meant either that Miss Miles was still alive then, or that she had just been killed and it was the murderer whom Susan heard typing. Wright’s investigation concentrated, therefore, on the period from 5.15 to 6 p.m. Inevitably, given these facts, it must: but to concentrate thus, Nigel reflected, was to ignore the problem of the missing key—the spare key to the side-door, which had last been seen by Miriam Sanders on Thursday morning. This key was not found in the dead woman’s possession. It must have been ‘borrowed’ by somebody else. Why borrow it except to get into the office after the main door was locked at 5.30? The partners and Stephen Protheroe each possessed a side-door key, so could have no reason for abstracting the spare one except to divert suspicion on to an outsider or some member of the staff.
Withdrawing his mind from these speculations, Nigel applied it again to the evidence. The movements of the people in whom he was particularly interested were briefly as follows:
ARTHUR GERALDINE. 4-5.50, in his room; 5-5.15, dictating letters (confirmed by secretary); 5.15-5.18, brief chat with S. Protheroe; 5.50 went upstairs to flat (confirmed by Mrs. Geraldine, who said that her husband was with her for the rest of the evening).
ELIZABETH WENHAM. 4-5.15, in her room; 5.10-5.15, discussing business with Basil Ryle; 5.15-5.20, in studio (confirmed); 5.20-5.30, in her room; 5.30, left office (confirmed by M. Sanders); 6.0 cocktail party, Chelsea (confirmed); 7.30, arrived home (confirmed by maid); dined alone, read a book, to bed at 11.
BASIL RYLE: 4-5, out of office, giving talk at Book Fair; 5.10, returned to office (confirmed by M. Sanders); 5.10-5.15, discussing business with E. Wenham; 5.15-6.0, working in room (confirmed by secretary for period 5.15-5.25); 6.0, to Festival Hall for dinner, then concert (not yet confirmed); 10.25, returned home.
STEPHEN PROTHEROE: 4-5.15, reading; 5.15, a few minutes’ chat with A. Geraldine (confirmed); then left building at 5.20 (confirmed by M. Sanders) and walked to Waterloo Station via Hungerford Bridge; caught 6.5 Southern Electric to Pennshill, Hants; 7.30, met by friends at Pennshill Station (not yet confirmed).
The immense task of interviewing the Wenham & Geraldine staff individually had, of course, not been covered today. After he had interviewed the principals, Inspector Wright and his sergeant, conducted by Basil Ryle, went the rounds of each department, asking the employees only if they had seen or heard anything suspicious on Friday evening. The result was a complete blank. Miriam Sanders declared that no unauthorised visitor had come to the building between 4 p.m. and 5.30, when she locked up. A considerable number of the employees—those who clocked out at 5 p.m.—could probably be dismissed from the reckoning: but there still remained some thirty of them, apart from the principals, whose movements would have to be given a routine check.
Police were still searching the building for the weapon and any blood-stained clothes that might have been hidden there. The murderer must have got a good deal of blood over himself, and it seemed unlikely he would walk out of the office in such a condition.
The weapon, thought Nigel. A razor. Which of the people who had a motive for killing her would use a razor? Such a primitive sort of weapon, so unlike the highly civilised persons who controlled the fortunes of Wenham & Geraldine. ‘Of course, there’s always Cyprian Gleed.’ He found he had said it aloud.
‘Yes,’ repeated Inspector Wright, looking up from Nigel’s report, ‘there’s always him. I sent a man to interview him this afternoon. Seems this Gleed was alone in his flat from 4.30 till 7.0 on Friday, then went out on a bender. Lives by himself over a shop in W.8: private door on street: no corroboration. Not very co-operative, my chap reported.’ The inspector sketched an epicene gesture. ‘Cyprian Gleed!—sounds as if he’d walked out of Wilde or Firbank. Miss Miles, now—was she a touch typist, d’you know, or the old two-finger-exercise stuff?’
‘How you dart about! I never saw her at work; but it sounded rapid and fluent enough to be touch-typing. Why?’
‘Just got a report from the fingerprint boys before I came along here. Only her prints on that typewriter. Prints of all ten fingers on the keys.’ Inspector Wright danced his own fingers on the table, glancing cannily at Nigel.
‘But?’
‘But the murderer was not conversant with the touch-typing system.’
‘Sorry, my head’s not too good just now.’
‘The fingerprints are on the wrong keys, if you get me. He must have pressed her fingers on them regardless, after she was dead. Cold-blooded character.’
‘And after he’d finished his own bit of typing. It’s another proof that he did some, isn’t it? And that he doesn’t want us to know he did?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Of course, she might have invented a touch-typing system of her own.’
‘Love making difficulties, don’t you? The Oxford mentality. Cheers.’ Wright drained his glass of Richebourg, and began collecting his papers. ‘I’m going to sort out young Cyprian tomorrow morning. Yo
u’d better come as my bodyguard. I’ll pick you up at 9.15. And thank you for my nice dinner.’
Nigel’s first cigarette the next morning, after an early breakfast, started a paroxysm of coughing which set his sinus aching fiercely again. He took some nose-drops and put the bottle in his pocket. Last time he had worked with Inspector Wright, he had been coshed silly; and now this stabbing pain over one eye. Wright is my jinx, he thought sourly. The prospect of reading through Miss Miles’s autobiography, after the fingerprint experts had dealt with it, appalled him. The secret of the crime very likely lay imbedded somewhere in its perfumed pages; but the possibility roused no enthusiasm in him. All he wanted was to crawl round to Clare’s studio and go to sleep.
In the police car, he began to feel a little better. Inspector Wright’s vitality was infectious; he could not imagine any state less active than his own, and this keyed you up when you were in his company.
The car stopped in front of an antique shop. Wright got out, followed by Nigel and a plainclothes sergeant, and rang the bell of a door at the side of the shop window.
‘You didn’t tell me you were bringing an army,’ Cyprian Gleed remarked when, after some delay, he had answered the bell. He was in silk pyjamas and a new, cardinal-red dressing-gown with a monogram on the breast pocket—an outfit which threw his scruffiness into strong relief but indicated why he was chronically short of money. He led them up a steep, narrow staircase to the top floor; the second floor, he explained, was crammed with the overflow from the antique shop.
His sitting-room was in a state of grotesque disorder, only equalled, in Nigel’s experience, by that of Clare Massinger’s studio. But, whereas her untidiness had something functional about it, or at least was the result of a single-minded concentration upon essentials, the disorderliness here seemed almost pathological. An expensive radiogram was still playing a progressive-jazz record as they entered. Two golden hamsters scrabbled up the side of a basket-chair. There were unwashed cups, plates and wine-glasses everywhere; sheets of music on the floor; encyclopedia volumes on an elegant harpsichord in one corner; a dusty easel in another; a single ski and, rather oddly, a pair of boxing gloves hanging from a nail, in a third corner. An open door revealed the bedroom, an unmade bed with a woman’s nightdress dangling from it, and a breakfast tray half concealed by a heap of clothes on the floor.
These fragments he has shored against his ruin, thought Nigel, feeling a little sorry for Millicent Miles’s son. Inspector Wright had taken a chair on one side of the gas fire, which was protected by a high, old-fashioned nursery fireguard.
‘I hope you will accept my sympathy sir in your bereavement,’ he formally but not perfunctorily began.
The young man’s face twitched, then set into a contemptuous look. ‘We can dispense with the preliminaries. I don’t like polite meaningless words. My mother is no loss to me. She ruined my character—everyone will tell you that.’
If it was intended to shock or otherwise impress the inspector, Cyprian Gleed’s speech fell remarkably flat. Wright, who had been gazing at him with the expression of a child seeing a new animal in the Zoo, replied briskly:
‘Good. That’ll save me a lot of trouble. You were here from 4.30 till 7 p.m. last Friday, I understand?’
‘So I told your minion.’
‘And after that?’
‘I couldn’t wait about any longer. I was meeting some friends, for dinner.’
‘You were expecting somebody who didn’t turn up?’
‘Yes. My mother.’
Inspector Wright, who always contrived to look madly interested in the statements of those he was interviewing, had something to look interested about now.
‘What time ought she to have arrived?’
‘After she’d finished work, the idea was: between 5.30 and 6.30.’
‘It was by arrangement?’
‘Ça se dit.’ Cyprian Gleed turned to the plainclothes man, who had stopped dead in his shorthand at this point, and translated: ‘That is obvious.’
‘When had the meeting been fixed?’
‘By telephone. The previous afternoon. I rang her at Wenham & Geraldine, and asked her to look in on her way home the next day.’
‘Any special reason for asking her, sir?’
Gleed’s white teeth gleamed behind the scrubby beard.
‘Of course there was. I never greatly cared to meet my mother socially.’
‘What was the purpose of this, er, appointment?’
‘Money. I wanted her to dish out.’
‘But she’d just refused you. That very morning,’ Nigel put in.
‘I fancied she would be more amenable later on.’
‘Why?’
‘Christ! … I beg your pardon, sir.’ It was Wright’s sergeant, upon whose notebook one of the hamsters had suddenly materialised. ‘Lumme, what is this? Shoo! Get off.’
‘Don’t get excited, Fenton. It’s a golden hamster. Give it one of your pencils to suck,’ suggested Inspector Wright.
But Fenton had already swept the animal off on to the floor, and the next moment he was defending himself against Cyprian Gleed who had sprung at him, shouting, ‘You bloody, clumsy oaf!’ and was scratching at his face like a woman. Nigel, who happened to be nearest, pinioned the young man’s arms and deposited him in the chair from which he had leapt.
‘Fenton,’ said Wright, winking at his subordinate, ‘no rough-housing here, please. And you must not be unkind to the animal creation. Hamsters are very pretty, inoffensive little beasts. Have you had these long, sir?’
Scowling, Gleed answered, ‘My mother always forced me to keep pets. They’re supposed to be good for maladjusted children. Substitute love-objects for the emotionally undernourished, if you see what I mean. Now I’ve got into the habit.’
‘I see.’ Wright stroked the back of the other hamster. ‘You were saying your mother would be more amenable later on. Why did you think so?’
‘Ask Strangeways. Perhaps he has a theory.’
I wonder why he dislikes me so much, thought Nigel. He decided to take up the challenge. ‘You were going to apply pressure—going to say you saw her tampering with the proof copy of Time to Fight? Is that it?’
Cyprian sneered at him again. ‘“Apply pressure!” That’s just like your generation. Tying pretty ribbons round ugly truths. Why not say, “blackmail”?’
‘If you prefer it,’ replied Nigel, rather nettled. ‘My generation doesn’t make a virtue of boorishness.’
‘And was your intention to blackmail your mother?’ Wright asked.
‘That’s Strangeways’s theory.’
The inspector let it go. ‘You didn’t think of ringing her up on Friday evening, when she was late for her appointment?’
‘She was working at the publishers, and their switchboard closes down at 5.30.’
‘And after that—Saturday and Sunday?’ Wright’s alert, friendly, terrier-like expression was unaltered. ‘Since you needed money so badly, I assume you tried to get in touch with her over the weekend.’
Cyprian grinned. ‘Is this a pitfall that I see before me? I always need money badly. But it could wait—it wasn’t all that urgent. Anyway, I was on a blind over the weekend. I started getting drunk at 7 p.m. on Friday. I remained drunk till Sunday morning. And from Sunday afternoon till Monday morning I was in bed with—or, as Strangeways would probably say, entertaining—a young lady.’
‘Miriam Sanders?’ inquired Nigel.
‘Correct.’
‘Do you benefit by your mother’s will, sir, may I ask?’
‘You may. I imagine so, but I don’t know for certain. She detested me. On the other hand, she was a conventionally-minded woman and would think that money should be left to one’s flesh-and-blood.’ Cyprian Gleed screwed up one corner of his mouth. ‘And now, may I ask a question?’
‘Certainly sir.’
‘Have you, in the course of your career, come across any matricides?’
‘Lord bless you, ye
s. Two or three. It’s comparatively rare, though, I agree.’
The young man seemed rather deflated by the inspector’s breezy reception of his query, and did not pursue the matter. Wright began taking names and addresses of people in whose company Gleed had spent the Friday night and Saturday. His sinus jabbing at him again, Nigel lay down on a settee and squirted nose-drops up his left nostril, averting his eyes, after one glance, from a wash painting on the ceiling, which the artist had mercifully left unfinished, of a satyr at grips with a nymph. Perhaps I’ve under-estimated young Gleed, he thought: he appears to have brains, and some courage—if his effrontery is a kind of courage and not just a product of living in a fantasy world. Sitting up, Nigel gazed round the fantastic room again, so deeply occupied with his own thoughts that, when Cyprian Gleed asked, ‘Well, do you like my flat?’ he uttered without premeditation what was in his mind.
‘It looks like a museum of false starts.’
Cyprian’s eyes rolled up and round, in that way reminiscent of his mother’s mannerism; then they went dead, as he surveyed Nigel for a few seconds without speaking.
‘Now, about the inquest, sir. You will be notified of it shortly. And the funeral arrangements—I dare say you would like your mother’s executor to take them off your hands.’
‘Executor?’ asked Cyprian dully. ‘What? Oh yes. For a moment I thought you’d said “executioner.”’
Fenton, not for the first time, breathed heavily over his shorthand notes, his whole expression registering outrage and antipathy.
‘Had your mother any enemies, sir?’
‘I wondered when we were coming to that. Dozens, I should think. If thoughts could kill, she must have borne a charmed life.’
‘But you’ve no reason to suspect anyone in particular? No threats, or—?’
‘I tell you who had good cause to wring her neck. Basil Ryle. She was playing him up. Love me, love my books. God! But I shouldn’t think he knew it. Besotted ass!’ The venomous disgust in Gleed’s voice made even Inspector Wright glance at him sharply. Oh dear, thought Nigel, this is Hamlet and his mum all over again.