Plain Murder

‘I said, “King’s Evidence!” Do you hear me? King’s Evidence!’

  Morris had recovered control over himself almost instantly.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said coldly.

  ‘Oh, don’t you? Well, you soon will. I’ve been thinking things over’ – Oldroyd had at any rate not been thinking the things he was saying at present; they were the result of immediate inspiration – ‘I’ve been thinking, I tell you. You just try and sack me from here and see what I do then, that’s all. What d’you think the police will say if I go to them and say I can tell them about—’

  He was checked by Morris’s frantic gesticulations for silence. Morris scrambled out of his chair and down from the dais and hurried in absurd haste to the door to make certain they were not being overheard. When he came back Oldroyd was calmer, because he was far more confident.

  ‘Yes,’ went on Oldroyd, ‘King’s Evidence. You know what that means. If they can hang you on what I can prove they won’t hang me. They’d like to know how Harrison died, wouldn’t they? And Reddy, too? You sack me, you put me out of a job, and that’s what they’ll do. So there!’

  Oldroyd glared defiantly at Morris, who had come up close to him, and stood towering over him, hands clasping and unclasping. Morris’s expression was one of dreadful rage. He would have been furious, in his new-found character of successful business man, at defiance from an inferior in any case. But this – this mad threat, this wild assault on his unassailable position, this pitting by Oldroyd of his little wits and determination against Morris’s vast brain and superhuman personality, nearly drove Morris frantic. The wound to his pride was enormous. And he saw the danger. If Oldroyd were, as Morris had threatened, dismissed from the employ of the Universal Advertising Agency, he might easily be desperate enough to carry out his threat. Even if the police did not advise accepting Oldroyd as King’s Evidence, they might be set on the right track by his plea, so that Morris as well as Oldroyd would go to the gallows. Even if Oldroyd saw this possibility he might not be deterred in his present state of blind fury, or in the cold desperation into which dismissal would plunge him. Morris suddenly found himself helpless. It was maddening to find himself, the clever, cunning, amazingly skilful Morris, at the mercy of this little fellow with the silly little moustache. It was just as maddening, oddly enough, for Morris, as a man of vast designs in the advertising world, to be defied by a little whipper-snapper of a clerk.

  For a space the brute in Morris seemed likely to assume control over the proceedings. Morris found himself drawing himself together, bunching himself up for a spring upon Oldroyd. His eyes were already seeking out the spot on his neck where his big hands would take their grip. His fingers were growing rigid and bent, like talons. Oldroyd noticed the menace in Morris’s attitude – he could hardly have failed to do so – and he in turn began to crouch forward to receive the spring; his lips went back a little from his teeth and he braced himself to fight for his life.

  But even as the two men edged closer together Morris’s plotting brain set a check on his bad temper. It would never do for him to indulge in an unseemly scuffle with a junior in the very heart of the office. The desire to rend and tear Oldroyd, to leave him a crumpled wreck on the floor was still present, but it was held back by his caution. And were he to kill Oldroyd there and then – and Oldroyd had been near to death at one moment – it would not be a neat murder, without trace. Morris would have to bear the consequences of it. Lastly his enormous vanity came to his rescue in a contrary kind of way. He would not mind yielding to the fellow’s demands, appearing to give way, because he was perfectly certain of overreaching him in the end. Oldroyd might score a point, but Morris had already scored so many that he need not mind. He could leave Oldroyd his thousands as long as he himself had his tens of thousands.

  And, having once made up his mind in this fashion, his natural scheming self carried the notion through without difficulty, without further thought. His muscles relaxed, his shoulders straightened up out of their menacing crouch. His thick lips assumed the smile of coarse geniality which sat so commonly upon them.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve done me this time. I don’t see how I can buck against you as long as you’re set on making a fool of yourself. I’ve got to put up with you, I suppose.’

  Oldroyd backed warily away from him before he, too, discarded his defensive attitude.

  ‘All right,’ he said hoarsely. His mouth and throat were parched with excitement.

  ‘You can do what you like in this damned office, I suppose, now,’ said Morris. He spoke in a tone full of the bitterness of defeat – just the tone which might be expected of him. Yet he knew none of that bitterness; his voice took on that tone instinctively, for Morris was a plotter born.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Oldroyd. He was still suspicious; no one knowing as much about Morris as he did would be otherwise.

  ‘But look here, old man,’ said Morris pleadingly, ‘don’t come it over me too much. The others’ll guess that something’s up if you do. Do a bit of work now and then, there’s a good chap. We can’t afford to take chances, either of us.’

  His plotter’s instinct told him that the best tactics at the moment were to lure his enemy into a state of over-confidence, and his every word and gesture adapted themselves at once to this end. His own perfect confidence in his ability to crush Oldroyd enabled him to humble himself thus without any wound to his self-esteem.

  ‘I’ll see,’ said Oldroyd cautiously.

  ‘I’ll tell you what!’ exclaimed Morris. ‘Let’s try working together. We’ve never done it yet. Why, you and I, Oldroyd – you with your brains and me being so pally with Campbell – we might do anything. Let’s back each other up. This office is going to be a big thing one of these days, you know.’

  There was absolutely nothing jarring in the pose or in the accent as Morris uttered the honeyed words. But as he said them there fluttered across Oldroyd’s mind a pictured memory of another scene in that same room – of Reddy being brought to shake hands with Morris and with him, the very day before Reddy was sent to his death. It was that memory which prevented Morris’s pretty little speech from having the slightest effect upon Oldroyd. Yet all the same Oldroyd had learned something by now of intrigue from the master of intrigue who stood before him.

  ‘All right, if you want to,’ he said simply.

  ‘Done!’ said Morris, smiting his hand with his fist. ‘That’s fine! We’ll be partners from now on. Why we’ll—’

  But Oldroyd was deprived of the felicity of hearing any more of the inventions of Mr Morris’s ingenious mind by the entry of Miss Campbell, newly returned from lunch. She saw nothing at all unusual in Mr Morris’s speaking vehemently to one of the staff and driving his points home with his fist on his hand. That was quite usual behaviour for Mr Morris.

  ‘So you’re back?’ said Morris to Miss Campbell. That was the sort of speech to be expected of Mr Morris, whose small talk bore none of the indications of an original mind.

  ‘I am,’ said Miss Campbell, sitting down at her table and hunting for the cherished drawing which lay there half finished.

  ‘Right!’ said Morris. ‘Then I can leave the office in good hands while I go and get my lunch. You’ll see that nobody comes and pinches the furniture, won’t you?’

  He reached for his hat and coat and sauntered out of the room, remembering, all the same, to throw a glance of reminiscent friendliness in Oldroyd’s direction. Certainly not Miss Campbell, probably no one at all, could have guessed that the room he left had just been the scene of a wild quarrel, and had nearly witnessed a struggle of life and death. In the same way, no one in the crowded Strand guessed that the thickset, jaunty young man with the fleshy features had two murders on his soul; certainly no one would possibly imagine that he was planning to rid himself of another possible enemy by the same abhorred crime.

  13

  Morris’s thoughts on the journey homewar
d that evening dwelt naturally on the subject of Oldroyd. There was no denying that the latter constituted a dangerous menace to Morris’s happiness on more than one account. Morris’s haughty vanity was touched by the thought that under him he had an employee whom he could not dare to dismiss and this, it may well be, was the mainspring of the emotion he felt. But besides that he was genuinely dissatisfied with the quality of Oldroyd’s work, and he would gladly see him out of the office, which was rapidly gaining a distinguished place in Morris’s affections and ambition. Lastly (and, let it be granted, leastly) came the fact that Morris was dependent for his life on Oldroyd’s silence. That in itself was sufficient justification for the murder of Oldroyd, according to the simple moral standard which Morris maintained. But, in face of Oldroyd’s capacity for harm, Morris refused to be frightened by it. It might affect his actions, but it did not cause him to feel afraid. Morris could not bring himself to believe that so obviously unimportant an individual as Oldroyd could be a danger to such a brilliant, successful, dangerous, clever person as Morris.

  The main characteristic of the crime of which Morris was guilty is its tendency to reproduce itself. A second murder will incur no additional penalty if the first is to be discovered, so that fear of punishment does not act as a deterrent. Fear of discovery is very largely overridden by the knowledge of previous success, and any natural repugnance the criminal may feel towards the taking of human life is largely blunted by the time he begins to consider the repetition of the crime. So that Morris, coming home, was coolly planning the murder of Oldroyd, as dispassionately as a butcher might meditate the slaughter of a sheep.

  ‘Coolly’ and ‘dispassionately’ are misleading words in this connection, however. Morris fired with the zeal of plotting was a different man from Morris studying a restaurant menu, or even from Morris devising an advertisement. His pulse-rate rose, and his blood coursed more freely, and his brain worked more rapidly and more clearly. It seemed as if he could catch and seize inspiration out of the stream of unpromising data which he passed rapidly in review before his mind.

  But it was a very, very difficult piece of constructive work to which Morris had applied himself. It is only when one is favoured with exceptional good fortune or unusual facilities that it is possible to kill a man in the heart of civilization without being found out. Morris came out of the station, he crossed the main road at the corner where Reddy met his death, and he walked up the steep hill – too fast, as usual – all the way to his house without having gained any inspiration from his creative mood. He felt balked and thwarted and annoyed by the time he had reached his front door.

  The sitting-room was littered with toys and unmended clothes and all the other things to be expected in the sole living-room of a small house containing two children, just before those children’s bedtime. Mrs Morris was sitting by the fire with John on her knee and John was howling most dolorously.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ said Morris, voicing his discontent with the world in general as much as his disgust with the sights that met his eyes and the noise that assailed his ears.

  ‘Oh, don’t you start, too!’ snapped his wife. ‘These kids have been enough to wear me out all day long.’

  ‘Take him up to bed, then,’ said Morris. ‘It’s past his bedtime, anyway.’

  For once Mrs Morris was ready to act on a suggestion of her husband’s. She rose from the chair with John in her arms, and John, with bedtime so near, and with everything in consequence to gain and nothing to lose, redoubled his howls and, writhing wildly in his mother’s arms, beat the air impotently with his kicking feet. The piercing quality of his shrieks maddened Morris.

  ‘Stop that, you little devil, can’t you?’ he demanded. ‘Stop it!’

  He took a stride towards the child, ready to strike; in justice to him it may be said at once that he most probably would have opened the clenched fist with which he menaced him before he struck. Mrs Morris gave a little cry and whirled round so as to interpose herself between her husband and her child. John was startled into two seconds’ silence, but then, finding himself safe behind his mother’s shoulder, he began to howl once more. Morris uttered a fierce oath.

  ‘Charlie!’ said Mrs Morris, inexpressibly shocked. ‘Not before the children!’

  ‘Then take them away!’ raved Morris. ‘Oh, God lumme, take ’em away!’

  He stamped his feet and clenched his fists, and Mrs Morris, thoroughly frightened, hastened out of the room, staggering under the weight of the big, heavy boy. John’s howls dwindled in volume behind the closed door, and died away still more as Mrs Morris dragged his writhing form up the stairs. Morris made a disgusted noise in his throat and threw himself into his chair. Molly, as ever during these commotions, continued to play imperturbably on the hearthrug. The two of them were still in the same relative positions when Mrs Morris came back into the room after putting John to bed.

  ‘I’ll be dam’ glad,’ announced Morris, ‘when these two kids have grown up a bit and stop being such an infernal worry.’

  He glowered at his wife as he spoke, and by doing so he caught sight of a curious change in her expression. She opened her mouth to speak, but as she did so her glance wavered across to Molly on the hearthrug, and she shut it again. Obviously she trembled on the brink of speech for half a minute, and obviously she drew back again timorously.

  ‘And what the hell’s the matter with you?’ demanded Morris crossly.

  ‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ said his wife, but it was not the truth that she spoke; even Morris could see that.

  It was not until much later, after Molly had been put to bed and Morris had eaten his supper, that Mary Morris began the subject which was so clearly distasteful to her; she dreaded the effect of her news on her husband and she bowed her head over her mending as she spoke, as much to prevent herself from seeing his expression as for concealing her own.

  ‘You spoke about the kids growing up just now, Charlie,’ said Mrs Morris.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to wait a bit longer, after all; there’s another one coming.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ said Morris.

  The arrival of the two children of whom he was already the father had thoroughly robbed him of any paternal feelings he may have once had. He could picture far too clearly the course of approaching events. Mary would grow more and more helpless as the months went on. She would come to ask his aid in the domestic work of the house. It would be he who would have to carry the kids up to bed; there would be evenings when he would come home and find Mary lying down and he would have to cook his own supper; perhaps the scullery would even be piled high with the accumulation of a whole day’s washing-up, which he would be expected to dispose of.

  All that irked him inexpressibly. It would have gone against the grain long ago, when he would have resented the incongruity of a big, brawny man like himself having to do housework; now that his opinion of himself was far more exalted he hated the idea more violently than ever.

  And his thoughts went on beyond that, too. There would be the time of the birth, when there would be a dictatorial nurse in the house. In his heart of hearts he knew (and was infuriated in consequence) that even he, the great Charlie Morris, would flinch and quail before that nurse and do her bidding humbly. Not merely that, but it would cost money – money for this and money for that, money for all sorts of unexpected items which it would be impossible either to foresee or to refuse. Morris was not a miser; he liked spending money freely, but he only liked spending money on himself. To spend it on a wailing baby whose arrival he positively did not desire was simply maddening. Years of penury had made Morris very sharp about obtaining full value for the money he disbursed.

  Lastly, after the nurse had departed and matters had come back again nearly to their poor normal, there would still be trouble. The kid would wail in the night with that maddening persistence typical of kids. He would wail and wail, and Charlie Morris knew
by experience that not even the great Charlie Morris would be able to stop it. Morris was able to picture with all the clarity of despair the sleepless, worrying nights, the baffling helplessness, the dreary sensation of the next morning. It would mean a lot of trouble, and it would be very hurtful to that vanity of his which he would have termed his self-respect had he devoted a thought to it.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ said Morris again, having worked up to this climax. But Mary Morris said nothing. She only went on darning socks.

  ‘You’re sure about this?’ demanded Morris. ‘Quite sure? How do you know?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Mary bitterly. ‘The usual way. I haven’t made a mistake.’

  ‘When was it?’

  ‘Six weeks ago. I expect it was – don’t you remember that time?’

  ‘Six weeks ago,’ said Morris, counting on his fingers. ‘December, January, February—’

  ‘It’ll be the end of August as near as makes no matter,’ said Mary, cutting him short.

  ‘End of August,’ said Morris, with his mind racing once more over the intervening months, through that summer when he had expected to achieve so much in the advertising world, up to the time when bullying nurses would arrive and expenses would be so heavy, and on again to the time of nightly wailings and cryings. His thoughts moved in a harassing circle.

  ‘Oh, confound it!’ said Morris. ‘Can’t you – can’t you do something about it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked his wife sharply.

  ‘You know. People do, sometimes. I’ve heard—’

  ‘No, I can’t,’ said Mary with decision. ‘I’m not going to make myself a wreck for life like Mrs Bartlett, if that’s what you mean.’

  If truth must be told, that was only part of Mary’s motive, and the least part, too. Even though she herself disliked the new turn events had taken, even though she had dreaded breaking the news to her husband, she found much to reconcile herself to the prospect. Already it had brought her well into the forefront of her husband’s attention, and that pleased her very decidedly. These recent evenings, when her husband had totally ignored her, had been beyond the reach of her chidings as of her affection, had begun to annoy her, had irked her sense of self-assertion. If by having a child she could once more claim something of her husband’s attention, that in itself made it worth while. Not merely that, but she would have grounds for thinking more about herself than before; she would be able to spend her uninteresting days pondering over her symptoms and her development. It would be something happening in a world where far too little happened for her taste. And, anyway, far in the depths of her there was something which was curiously pleased at the prospect of having another child; just by that, without further consideration.