Further questions produced for Nigel the information that the main door was locked and bolted at 5.30, anyone leaving after 5.30 would go out by the side door. The receptionist remained at her post till 5.30, and had already told the partners that General Thoresby had not returned to the building after his departure.
‘What about this side door? Who has keys to it.’
‘The partners. Myself. And there’s a spare in the receptionist’s desk. I believe Millicent Miles has borrowed it once or twice when she wanted to come back and work late.’
‘So, after 7.0 that evening, there was no one in the building, officially, except Mr. Geraldine?’
‘And his wife. As far as we can tell.’
‘What about Miss Miles? Was she here that day?’
‘I simply can’t remember. It was so long ago.’
Nigel threw his head back and gazed down his nose at Stephen Protheroe.
‘Perhaps it strikes you as odd that I want to know about the movements of the people who should be most above suspicion. But who else—except the partners, the author and yourself—would have known, at the time, about the libellous passages?’
Stephen gave a snuffling laugh. ‘My dear chap, you’ve no idea, the gossip that goes on—’
‘But how could it start? From whom?’
‘Jane, for example. Arthur’s secretary. She was taking notes at the meeting with Thoresby that afternoon.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed she is not perfectly discreet.’
‘You’ve got to realise that in a publishing house—odd as it may seem—a lot of people are genuinely interested in books: anyone attached to the partners or the editorial staff almost certainly is. I bet you the news about the General’s trying to put one over us was all round the building in a few hours.’
‘I’ll believe you. Next morning, then. You arrived at?—’
‘Nine-thirty.’
‘The page proofs were where you had left them.’
‘Not exactly. But the cleaners always shift everything on my desk.’
‘You didn’t casually turn back to the deleted passages?’
‘No. I went straight on correcting from where I had left off.’
‘Were you in this room the whole time from 9.30 till 11.0 when you took the proof copy to Mr. Bates?’
‘I’ve been trying to remember, ever since this thing blew up. I was certainly in the loo for five minutes, being a man of regular habits—probably at about 9.45. And of course one hops out now and then to have a chat with somebody. It’s really impossible to be accurate at such a distance of time.’
‘So, theoretically, there were opportunities for the proof to be tampered with any time between 6.30 p.m. on the 23rd and 11 a.m. on the 24th: after that, only Bates himself or some Black Hand at the printers could have done it.’
‘You can dismiss Bates from your mind at once. He’s an atrocious old bore, but he’d never do anything to injure the firm. But all this is assuming that I’ve been telling you the truth,’ added Stephen, with an impish look.
‘We’ll work on that assumption,’ Nigel answered. ‘For the present.’
‘The trouble is, I had so much more opportunity than anyone else.’
‘What would be your motive, then?’
‘Ah, there you have me. I really can’t imagine.’
Nigel’s pale blue eyes were alive with interest—an infectious though impersonal interest which had drawn confidences, almost hypnotically, from many people whose interests had by no means been served by making them. He leant back and said:
‘Well, who do you think did it?’
Stephen’s thin lips, turned down at the corners, nibbled for words. What he would have replied, Nigel was not to know; for the sliding window behind Stephen’s back opened, and a voice said:
‘How do you spell “holocaust”?’
‘It’s a word I never use,’ Stephen sourly answered, over his shoulder.
‘Haven’t you got a dictionary there?’ Millicent Miles’s head protruded through the window, like a horse’s looking over the top of a loose-box. ‘Oh, you’ve a visitor.’
‘Yes.’
‘Won’t you introduce me?’ asked Nigel, rising to his feet.
‘Mr. Strangeways—Miss Miles.’ Stephen added grumpily: ‘He’s come to do some reading for the firm.’
Millicent Miles extended a jewelled hand through the window. ‘I’m so glad. I hope you’ll be on my side. You must talk Mr. Protheroe round: he’s so obstinate.’
Nigel had no idea what she was talking about. Pinched Knightsbridge accent; black woollen dress, a little dandruff on the shoulders; the pearl choker; large mouth and prominent teeth; green, rather insolent eyes, with that wandering look to be found in the eyes of authors and snob hostesses. So much, Nigel took in at once. Conversation through the sliding window was difficult: one had to stoop sideways, as if talking to a booking-clerk.
‘How’s the book getting on, Miss Miles?’ he asked.
Her eyes rolled up and round—a trick of hers, he was to learn, and oddly gauche in a woman so self-possessed: it must be a throwback, he thought, to the days when she was young, shy, intense, awkward.
‘It’s a dreadful struggle,’ she said.
‘I thought your births were always painless,’ remarked Stephen Protheroe.
Miss Miles laughed, showing her large teeth. ‘That’s a common masculine delusion, isn’t it, Mr. Strangeways?’
‘Not in this case,’ said Stephen. ‘Your typewriter has never paused for breath this morning. You write in a condition of self-hypnosis, you know.’
‘I do write, anyway,’ she retorted, smiling too sweetly at Stephen’s averted face.
These exchanges puzzled Nigel. They sounded like the wrangling of an old married couple, the weapons’ edges blunted by long use. Protheroe, of course, was an eccentric, a law unto himself: one did not expect from him the normal amenities and evasions of social intercourse.
‘I suppose you’ve known each other a long time?’ he asked.
The other two spoke almost together.
‘It seems a very long time.’
‘We’ve been neighbours since June, when I began using this room. I’ve got quite used to Mr. Protheroe’s idiosyncrasies. His bark is worse than his bite.’
Nigel smiled. ‘For me, as Christopher Fry would say, the Bark is Bite Enough.’
Miss Miles gave her loud, rattling laugh. ‘I must remember that.’
‘She’ll put it into her book,’ muttered Stephen, ‘with or without acknowledgments.’
‘Come and talk to me, won’t you, Mr. Strangeways. I’ve done my morning’s stint. And I really can’t converse doubled-up like this.’
Nigel raised his eyebrows at Stephen, who seemed sunk in a pit of disgust; then, picking up the proof of Time to Fight, went out into the passage. The door of Miss Miles’s room, he noticed, had a new lock. The room was larger than Stephen’s, but sparsely furnished. A table and office chair stood on a rug in the middle, the chair’s back to the door. An armchair, an electric fire, a vase of flowers on the window-sill, and a typewriter: little else. A neat pile of typescript was laid beside the machine. Pinned to a wall, a piece of squared paper caught Nigel’s eye.
‘That’s my work-graph,’ said Miss Miles. ‘Every day I extend the line to show how many words I have written. It keeps me up to the mark.’
‘Very business-like of you.’
‘Well, writing is a business. I’ve no patience with the highbrow attitude. I have a certain commodity at my disposal. I wish to sell it in the best market. I’ve got to keep up my output.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Are you very shocked?’
Nigel made a polite, deprecatory sound.
‘How long have you been in this trade? I don’t seem to remember—’
‘I do a bit of specialised reading from time to time.’
‘I think specialisation is the curse of our age.’ Miss Miles delivered the truism with all the animation of one who is planting the
flag on virgin soil. ‘Hallo,’ she went on. ‘You’ve got Thor’s book.’
‘You know him well?’
‘I know too many people. It’s the bane of a successful writer’s life—one simply can’t get away from one’s public. Lectures, cocktail parties, fan-mail, press interviews—sometimes I wish I’d never set pen to paper.’ Miss Miles sighed, rather theatrically.
‘But you enjoy it?’ And it’s all grist to the autobiography.’
The popular authoress gave him a little-girl look. ‘Do you agree with me that one’s autobiography should be absolutely, fearlessly frank?’
‘Well, about oneself perhaps. But if you start lacing into other people—’ Nigel held up the proof copy.
‘Oh yes. I believe there’s been some trouble about Thor’s—’
‘You know damned well there has,’ came a barbed voice from the next room. ‘And exactly what trouble too.’
Millicent Miles rose from her armchair and shut the sliding window.
‘Odious little man,’ she muttered. ‘But he’s a genius in his own line. One must make allowances.’
In talking with an egotist it is never difficult to steer the conversation into a given channel without his perceiving it: the difficulty is to keep it there. Millicent Miles’s egotism, Nigel judged, had much in common with a child’s; and no doubt it was the permanently non-adult part of her mind which had made her so prolific and successful a writer of Romances. At any rate, she showed no reluctance to talk about the libel imbroglio, and no suspicion that Nigel was anything but a personable stranger who enjoyed conversing with Millicent Miles. Nigel was careful, of course, to keep her at the centre of the picture. A novelist such as she, he disingenuously put forward, had special powers of observation and character-judgement. Were he one of the partners, it was she to whom he would come first for advice, particularly as she’d been working next door to the room where the proof copy had been tampered with. Naturally, she must have been concentrating upon her own work at the time: but often the subconscious, particularly of so sensitive a person as Miss Miles, took in things its owner was unaware of till later. But perhaps she had not been in the office at all on July 23rd and 24th?
The question was quickly settled by a glance at the wall chart. The graph-line was solid for the days she had worked in the office, dotted for those when she had been absent: the line for 23rd-24th July was solid. But, as to any furtive comings-and-goings in the next room on those dates, her mind was a blank. People were constantly popping in and out of one another’s rooms here, she complained: that was why she had asked Mr. Geraldine to have a lock put on her door.
Since Millicent Miles’s interest in the affair of the proof copy was confined to her own presence near the scene of the crime, Nigel could pursue the subject no further—not, at any rate, in his role of temporary reader. He tried another opening.
‘When you came into Protheroe’s room just now, you said something about hoping I’d be on your side.’
‘Yes, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, privately.’ She lowered her voice, glancing at the partition between her room and Protheroe’s. ‘When Mr. Ryle asked me to give this firm my autobiography, there was an understanding that Wenham & Geraldine should also reprint some of my novels—the earlier ones which have been out of print for some time. I am convinced’—her green eyes took on a far-away look, as though she were reverently contemplating some spiritual revelation—‘I am convinced that they have a message for the younger generation today. Which makes Stephen Protheroe’s opposition all the more disgraceful.’
‘You say there was “an understanding” between you and Mr. Ryle. But you’ve no clause in your contract—?’
‘It was a gentleman’s agreement. One expects such understandings to be honoured by any reputable firm.’
‘But surely Protheroe hasn’t all that much influence here?’
‘Oh, he’s their little tin god’—a certain coarseness of intonation began to show through her Knightsbridge accent—‘and Miss Wenham for some reason has taken against me. Ridiculous frump! Between the two of them, they can put such pressure on Arthur Geraldine—he always was a weak man—’
Nigel let her rattle on, repeating her grievance with every variation known to female ingenuity. Preserving (he hoped) the respectful but non-committal expression of a new employee of the firm, who must neither be disloyal to its policy nor discouraging to one of its lucrative authors, Nigel, under cover of the typewriter, idly riffled through the pages of Time to Fight till he found the chapter ending which had caused the trouble. He saw a stet mark against the last paragraph. Then a word in it rose up at him—the word ‘holocaust.’
When Millicent Miles had talked herself to a temporary standstill, Nigel rose to go, assuring her that he would do everything within his very limited power, etc. etc. As he went, his hand brushed against the pile of typescript lying face-down on the table, and dislodged some of the top sheets. Apologising profusely, he picked them up from the floor and replaced them—but not before his eye had swiftly taken in the last sentences Miss Miles had typed before coming into Protheroe’s room. The word ‘holocaust’ did not appear in them; nor, even allowing for the wild vagaries of her style, did they offer any conceivable context for such a word.
Chapter 3
Stet
HALF AN HOUR later, Nigel Strangeways was eating sandwiches and drinking Scotch ale in a pub off the Strand. The place was patronised chiefly, it seemed, by the lower ranks of Business and the Civil Service, the latter distinguished by large, black Homburg hats crammed down over their ears and a self-important manner of speech, the former by a drab and synthetic bonhomie which might have been learnt from a chapter on the Man-to-Man Approach in some manual for commercial travellers. The two types were identical, however, in one respect—that hideous and slovenly accent which is the marriage of dying Cockney with a degraded culture. No wonder, thought Nigel, people devour the impossible Romances of Millicent Miles: reality is altogether too sordid. But reality, if one looked round at a place like this, was also quite unreal. These Clerical Officers, these good fellows (our representative, Mr. Smith, will call upon you … ), herding together for protection against their own individual nonentity, uneasily cocky in their own century of the Common Man—what had they to support them but a kind of abstract and meaningless status? ‘Unreal City,’ he murmured: ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.’
Not that a publisher’s office gave any strong conviction of reality, either. How could it, living on such an unsolid commodity as words? Upon authors, those furtive and self-centred ghosts for ever spinning words to conceal their shame, their impotence, their inescapable shadowiness? Miss Miles, who wrote far too much: Stephen Protheroe, who had apparently dried up: General Thoresby—no, the General was different, a man who used words, as he would use artillery, to destroy the enemy.
‘Do you believe in coincidence?’ Nigel suddenly asked a total stranger—one of the black-hatted brigade—who had sat down at his little table and was unspeakably pouring ketchup over a plateful of cold salmon.
‘Pardon?’ The individual eyed Nigel with suspicion and resentment.
‘I said, do you believe in coincidence?’
‘Worl, yew’ve got to be a bit cautious nahdays what-chew credit. And who yew talk to,’ he added truculently.
‘Throw caution to the winds. It’s the bane of you Civil Servants. Forget your files for once, and study a live human face. Do I look like a confidence man or a Teddy Boy?’
‘Worl—’
‘You are perfectly correct. I can see you are an acute judge of character. Now then, do you believe in coincidence?’
‘Funny thing you should mention it,’ replied the stranger, humouring him. ‘Only this morning the worf says—’
‘Never mind what your wife said. I’m asking you—’
‘Aw downt quart lawk yewer tone.’
‘In an age swamped by mechanistic ph
ysics and mechanistic psychology, the only rock left above the surface is coincidence—beautiful, anarchistic coincidence. In a society that bows down and worships at the altar of statistics, coincidence is the one remaining manifestation of a higher Providence.’
‘Aw’m a free-thinker mawself.’
‘You will say, perhaps, that the science, art or sullen craft of criminal detection should confine itself to facts which admit of a casual explanation. I disagree. A science which leaves no room for coincidence—that is to say, for two apparently related events to happen simultaneously without there being any actual connection between them whatsoever—is an inadequate science, a false science. Must you go?’
The stranger mumbled that he had seen a friend come in, and removed his plate, his beer and his person, the latter visibly sweating.
Having got the table to himself again, Nigel resumed his train of thought. For all his recent defence of an arbitrary and over-riding Law manifesting itself in coincidence, he found it difficult to swallow the particular example he had been offered this morning. He turned once again to the offending passage in General Thoresby’s book. There it was, crossed out, a delete mark at the side, this mark crossed out in its turn, dots under the lines and a stet sign clearly written in the margin. It was not a very long paragraph, but it was dynamite.
To sum up, the Governor’s handling of the disturbances from start to finish (if ‘handling’ is a word appropriate to one who never lifted a finger till it was too late) gave an object lesson in nerveless ineptitude, and constitutes a major blot upon the already chequered annals of our Colonial Administration. Firm action at the start would have rendered the disaffected elements powerless. Firm action, even after the rising had gathered force, would have quelled it with a minimum of bloodshed. But the Governor, occupied with the more congenial business of cocktail parties, opening bazaars and enjoying his siestas, took no action whatsoever except to obstruct the military in their efforts to disperse the mobs. As a result of his criminal negligence there was considerable loss of life and widespread destruction of property. The holocaust at the Ulombo barracks, where a half-company of the Sussex Fusiliers perished to a man, is but one of the needless disasters for which a supine and incompetent administrator must be held directly responsible.