Minute for Murder

  “And Jimmy couldn’t?”

  Brian Ingle fell into his fit of abstraction again. When he spoke, it seemed, as so often it did with him, at a tangent to the subject.

  “She used to come and see me sometimes, in my rooms—I always refused to come here—about the only thing I ever did refuse her. She knew she could rely on me to listen, to console her. About her life with Jimmy.”

  “That was rather cruel of her, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes, I suppose so. One is cruel when one’s in love. To everyone else, I mean, if one’s as much in love as Nita was with Jimmy. The single-minded person is bound to ride roughshod over everyone’s feelings. And I tell you, it’d have killed her if Jimmy had left her.”

  “She’d had lovers enough before him,” said Nigel with a deliberate roughness. Brian Ingle did not wince.

  “That’s why,” he said, following some enigmatic thought of his own. “You see, they all left her, sooner or later. None of them offered to marry her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she was too beautiful. Her beauty misled them, Nigel. They thought they’d got the perfect—well, the perfect courtesan. And presently they found out it was a sort of trap: you walked into the Temple of Aphrodite Pandemos, and you found yourself in a snug domestic interior with knitting lying about and the Hoover humming away. Like this.” He gestured round the room with his hand.

  “It seems to have suited Jimmy all right, though.”

  “Nita thought so too, at first. For quite a time. So did he, I expect. He and his wife are sophisticated people. They’re what’s called ‘modern ’: easy come, easy go. Nita was something quite different. Her passion for domesticity—well, it’d be a sort of new, delightful game for him, at first. And then he’d begin to realise that for her it wasn’t a game, it was in dead earnest——”

  “And no chance of ‘easy go ’?”

  “Well, can you blame her? I know it’s easy to talk about a woman getting her claws into a man, suffocating him—oh dear, that word ‘suffocate,’ how it does bring back all the novels by lady novelists of a certain type I used to review. But people who talk like that never put the other side of the case to themselves—the woman’s side. It was just because Nita had led a rackety life, just because all those men wanted her as a mistress, not as a wife, that she grew to put so high a value on security. Every woman wants security, of course: it’s biological. But Nita was dotty about it. I used to laugh at her. Gently, of course. She’d no sense of humour, though, poor darling. Why should she anyway, on that subject? Oh, yes, she looked so poised and invulnerable and successful, didn’t she? And beneath it there was panic and chaos. She’d no more belief in herself: thought there must be something terribly wrong with her, because no one would marry her and give her security.”

  “But Jimmy did? Give her security, I mean?”

  “He gave her all the accessories of it, yes,” replied Brian with another long look round the room. “And therefore the sense of it, for a while—you know how women have to deceive themselves into taking the shadow for the reality, when the reality isn’t there—making emotional bricks without straw. And because he’d given her so strongly the sense of security——” Brian broke off suddenly.

  “——her disillusionment when she discovered he’d only been playing at home-making was all the more painful?” suggested Nigel.

  Brian Ingle appeared to contemplate this from every angle, like a housewife turning over a prospective purchase on a stall, before he answered.

  “I wonder is that quite right. I wonder. I’d say there was a time when Jimmy only played at home-making. But then a point was reached when his home-making with Nita became so real that it started to challenge his real home, with his wife, if you see what I mean. A conflict was set up within him. And a very painful one it’d be. He’d know then that he must choose between the two—the equilibrium couldn’t be preserved any longer. From that point he was a divided mind—and Nita began to be unhappy.”

  Nigel found all this of absorbing interest. Brian’s comments were so much more solid than, for instance, Merrion Squires’ dashing but superficial strictures on the two persons in question.

  “So you think Jimmy was trying to break free?”

  “Unconsciously, yes. Mind you, Nita must have had a great physical hold over him, too. I’d say he was a morally weak man: infirm of purpose: the Micawber streak too—waiting for something to turn up which would cut the knot he hadn’t the resolution to cut himself.”

  “In this case, the end of the war?”

  “No doubt. It would force him to act one way or the other. I dare say he didn’t know which knot it would cut for him, either.”

  “The Nita knot or the Alice knot?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And Nita was aware of this conflict in his mind?”

  “She knew he was on edge. And she tried her best to pull him over the edge on to her side.”

  “Hence the request for a divorce?”

  “That. And other things. She was fighting for her life, poor girl, after all.”

  “Other things?”

  “I don’t know—I’ve never experienced—but I can imagine how a woman might create a blazing inferno for a man she was determined to keep, every word fanning a flame, every look and gesture and silence a reproach or an appeal, every trick in the bag used. I bet she had plenty, too.”

  “But, if she was in effect making things so hot for him, why shouldn’t he just walk out?”

  “Oh, my dear Nigel, life isn’t as simple as that. She was in his blood. He loved her. Oh, yes, he really loved her. He wouldn’t get rid of her just by walking out—he was far too intelligent a man to suppose that.”

  “He wouldn’t be rid of her, of his problem, his conflict, till she was dead?” asked Nigel purposefully.

  Brian Ingle shrank back in the chair, holding up his hands as if to ward off the question.

  “No,” he exclaimed. “No, no! Please. This is dreadful. It sounds as if I’d been meaning to accuse him of—— Honestly, I didn’t.”

  “But the thought has occurred to you, perhaps?”

  The longest of all Brian’s silences ensued. He might have been in an epileptic trance, dumb and insentient. At last he spoke, almost to himself:

  “Nita was frightened.”

  Another pause.

  “Frightened? Recently?”

  “The morning she died—was murdered.”

  “How was that?” asked Nigel, gently, delicately, as if humouring a child.

  “I didn’t tell the Superintendent,” said Brian slowly. “When he interviewed me, I wasn’t in the mood, I didn’t care two pins who had killed her, it didn’t seem to matter. That was wrong of me, no doubt. Anyway, the morning she died, she came into my room at the Ministry, early. I could see she was very upset—almost incoherent, trying to tell me something. ‘Oh, Brian, what am I to do? What am I to do? ’ She kept saying. Wildly. You know, when that sort of woman gets in a panic, she’s like an animal. It’s terrifying. The mental anguish communicates itself to her body: you see her body, her face—it’s like an animal in a trap—you see it actually struggling, jerking, twitching one moment, and the next absolutely inert, frozen, in a sort of coma, like the animal shamming dead.”

  Brian Ingle broke off abruptly, silenced by the pain of the recollection.

  “What did she say?” asked Nigel.

  “I’ve been trying to remember. It’s awfully difficult. You see, she really was—well, like a person in delirium. Her words hardly made sense. She kept repeating, ‘It’s my last chance. He said it was my last chance.’ ‘Last chance to do what? ’ I asked. ‘To give him up.’ ‘Give Jimmy up, you mean?’ She nodded. ‘But I won’t,’ she said: ‘I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.’ And then she burst into a terrible fit of sobbing. I tried to soothe her. She did quieten down a bit. And I asked her—I don’t know why—when he’d said this. ‘Last night. He came to my flat. Brian, I’m so frightened, I don’t know
what to do.’ I couldn’t talk to her any more, because Jimmy came in—I suppose he’d heard her voice from outside— and he said he wanted her straight away to type some letters for him.”

  “Do you remember anything else she said? Anything. Doesn’t matter how wild it was.”

  “No. . . . Wait a minute . . . Yes, there was one very curious thing she said—really delirious it seemed. She muttered, ‘It startled me so when I saw him. I knew he’d be like that. But it was horrible, Brian. You wouldn’t understand, though.’ And then, after a bit, she went on, ‘I wish I could trust him. There’s no one I can trust now.’ So of course I said she could always trust me and tried to comfort her. And of course she said, ‘I know, Brian: but you’re different.’ Oh, yes, I was always different. Just the faithful little dog to take out for a walk when there was no one else——”

  Brian broke off, clearly ashamed of this little touch of bitterness.

  “And this ‘he ’ she kept talking about. The ‘he’ who was giving her a last chance, whom she wished she could trust. Whom do you suppose she meant?”

  “Well, that’s obvious, surely.” Brian’s eyes opened wide in astonishment. “Who would she be talking about but Jimmy?”

  “But why should Jimmy ‘startle’ her so when she saw him?”

  “Well, I dunno. I suppose she wasn’t expecting him, or something. Who else would come to her flat at night —who else, I mean, with that power to upset her?”

  “Who indeed?” replied Nigel, gazing down at his feet and the mellow Persian rug on which they rested. The ‘he’ whom poor, frantic Nita had spoken of—it could be Jimmy, it need not be Jimmy; she might, for that matter, have been talking about two separate he’s. It all depended.

  But further questioning extracted no more meat from this egg. Brian Ingle was beginning to look about him, in an absent, impatient way.

  “You’d like to take your book now?”

  Jumping up from his chair, Brian went over to the book-shelves and ran his eye along them.

  “Ah, here it is.” He gazed for a moment at the inscription on the fly-leaf, then put the book in his pocket.

  “Hallo,” he said, “I didn’t know any one read Clough nowadays.” He took up the poems of Clough, still lying on the table beside Nigel’s chair, and opened it at the marker. “Well now, that’s an interesting passage,” he said presently. “He’d have made a good novelist, wouldn’t he? ‘Like losings in games played for nothing.’ Funny we should have been using that word just now.”

  “What word?”

  “‘Games.’ The idea, anyway. ‘Playing at home-making.’”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, to be sure.”

  “I say, Nigel, you’d think Clough had known Jimmy personally, wouldn’t you? Extraordinary. A life-size, life-like portrait of him, this is. Or of Nita’s idea of him, anyway.”

  “But it must have been another likeness in the passage that caught her attention. How does it go? ‘Lo, with her calm eyes there she met me and knew nothing of it —Stood unexpecting, unconscious. She spoke not of obligations.’ That’s Alice Lake, I take it.”

  “Mmm. Yes. I suppose it is. But what makes you think that was the bit Nita was interested in?”

  “Look at the margin. She wrote a capital A there. A for Alice.”

  “Sounds like a bomber. Yes, so she did. It’s so faint, I didn’t notice it at first. No, she didn’t, though. This isn’t her writing. She always made a sort of printed A. This is an A with a squiggle. Look.”

  Nigel jumped up and almost snatched the book from him.

  “Yes, by Jove, you’re quite right. Can’t think how I missed it. I’ve seen her initial A often enough. She used her full name, Anita, when she signed minutes, didn’t she? Well, I must say that’s very odd. And the only other person who’d have been likely to mark the book is Jimmy himself.”

  “And his capital A is quite different from this one.”

  “Yes. Oh, well, it probably doesn’t mean anything at all. I must be getting along now. Nothing else you’d like to take away?”

  Brian Ingle said no. His eyes lingered sadly over the room for a minute. Then he turned away and left. As soon as the door closed behind him, Nigel went back to the bookcase and began looking through the fly-leaves of the books. At last he found what he wanted—a book with an inscription to Jimmy from Nita. He brought it to the window and compared it closely with the letter in the margin of the Clough.

  It had suddenly occurred to him that, if you took a capital and added to it , you would produce an precisely the same as appeared in the margin. Provided it was the right kind of J. And now, on the fly-leaf of the book he had found, was “Jimmy, with all my love, Nita.” And the J of Jimmy seemed identical in shape with the left-hand J stroke of the letter in the margin. The natural deduction was that Nita had originally written a J there, because the passage had reminded her of Jimmy, and it was presumably she who had pencilled the question-mark beside it, too. Then someone had come along and turned the J into an . Who? And why? Nigel could not, as yet, be sure. And anyhow, it might well just be an idle, meaningless bit of doodling. But possibly the scientific boys at New Scotland Yard would be able to detect whether the was in fact a composite letter, made by two different hands. It would help to be quite sure of that. Nigel left the flat, carrying the two books under his arm, and walked in the direction of New Scotland Yard.

  A few hours later, as he was dining at the Club, a servant called him out to the telephone. It was Blount at the other end.

  “That book you left for me. Our people tell me they think the is composite. The J part is slightly less indented than the rest, anyway. And there’s a slight thickening on the down-stroke of it, which you’d expect from the normal way of writing a J—starting at the top, I mean, and ending with the curl. To write a capital of that kind, you’d normally start at the curl and go upwards, and then do the right-hand side of the letter with a down-stroke, and——”

  “All right. I’m ahead of you. What about the second source of poison? Have you had time to get on to that?”

  “Yes. At least four of the suspects had access to some form of cyanide.”

  “Gor lumme! Now I’ve done it! That’s too much, Blount.”

  “Billson used it for photographic purposes. Mr. Lake and Mr. Fortescue possess, or rather say they once possessed, capsules of the poison. Mrs. Lake had access to Mr. Lake’s capsule. Billson had signed for his supply in the ordinary way: we’re checking the amount he received from the chemist with the amount he has left. Mr. Lake and Mr. Fortescue say they got theirs privately in the autumn of 1940, when the invasion scare was on: they both believed they were on the Nazi Black List, so they wished to be prepared.”

  “But they say they haven’t got their capsules now?”

  “Mr. Fortescue claims that on V.E. Day, he—e’eh, pulled the plug on his: had a solemn little ceremony all by himself. Mr. Lake—I went to see him—had his capsule carefully locked away: at least he thought he had; but when I opened the drawer with the key he gave me, it wasn’t there. Mrs. Lake protested that she knew nothing about the existence of this capsule, and couldn’t account for its disappearance. So there you are. And now you’d better tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Just a minute. All of them volunteered this information quite freely?”

  “Yes. Ye-es. Mrs. Lake was a bit rattled, I doubt: she was with her husband when I asked him. But there was no attempt at prevarication or concealment.”

  “Did Lake and Fortescue know about each other’s acquisition of cyanide capsules?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has Fortescue no other source? Doesn’t he use potassium cyanide, too, for photographic purposes?”

  “He says no. We shall check this, of course.”

  “You realise, Blount, that his admission about the capsule is a point in his favour as far as the Q Photographs are concerned? He would hardly need to furnish himself with poison if he was an agent of the Nazis.”

  “Not to ta
ke in the event of the Germans occupying Great Britain, I agree. But he’d need it if the British counter-espionage caught up with him.”

  “In that case, why should he destroy the capsule on V.E. Day? He might well have still needed it.”

  “We’ve only his word that he destroyed it.”

  “Certainly. But it’d be to his interest to produce it now, if he still had it. However, my only point at the moment is that Hark’ee’s possession and alleged destruction of the capsule works in his favour over the Q photographs but against him over Nita Prince’s death.”

  The telephone yammered a bit.

  “But, my dear sir, are you suggesting that Major Kennington’s poison container was not the means of her death? This is absolutely——”

  “Oh, talking of Kennington, surely he had some quick means of suicide, for his espionage work in Germany?”

  “Yes,” said Blount gloomily. “You could float a duck on the amount of cyanide that’s pouring in just now. He volunteers that he did possess a capsule, but says he handed it in at his Headquarters when he left Germany. I’m checking this, of course. The War Office have sent out a signal for me.”

  “I take it that these three capsules—Lake’s, Fortescue’s and Kennington’s—would all be of the soluble type?”

  “That is so.”

  “And what about Squires and Ingle? Didn’t they have a few pints of poison salted away somewhere?”

  “According to their own statements, none,” replied Blount with gravity.

  “Too bad. No doubt you’ll be circularising the chemists. Don’t leave any one out. Well, Blount, I wish you’d do Something for me.”

  “What’s this, now?” asked Blount suspiciously.

  “Try and find some more poison.”

  The telephone yammered in a quite demented way, and Nigel held the receiver away from his ear for a few moments. When Blount had unburdened his bosom, Nigel said:

  “I think it would be a good plan to get a search warrant and start searching our suspects’ belongings for a poison container—a poison container so like the one Kennington took off Stultz as to be indistinguishable from it.”