Minute for Murder

  There was an awful silence on the line. Nigel could almost feel Blount struggling to master his emotions. At last, in a sternly-controlled voice, the Superintendent asked:

  “Where do you suggest I should begin this—this wild-goose search?”

  “Oh, begin with the Lakes. Or Charles Kennington.”

  “You know Kennington has moved into the Lakes’ house?”

  “He has, has he? Well, well, well. I’ll invite him here to lunch to-morrow, so you can have a free hand.”

  “And now—e’eh—in this little formality of a search warrant, perhaps you’d be kind enough to tell me on what grounds I should apply for it,” said Blount with heavy sarcasm.

  “My dinner’s getting cold. Never mind. It’s like this, Blount——”

  And Nigel explained to the Superintendent the idea which had come to him that afternoon in Nita Prince’s flat—the answer to the question why it had been necessary for the murderer to spirit “Stultz’s thing” out of the Director’s room after the murder, and how he had been able to do it.

  When Nigel had finished, Blount agreed to ask for a search warrant.

  CHAPTER IX

  REFERENCE: MRS. LAKE

  ELEVEN O’CLOCK THE next morning, Sunday, found Nigel Strangeways on his way in a bus to the Lakes’ house at Regent’s Park. He had already, the previous night, secured Major Kennington for lunch. But, before he talked to him, there were certain things which he wished to ask Jimmy and Alice Lake. And certain things which, though he could not ask them, he hoped to discover. Nigel believed that he now knew the identity, the motive and the method of Nita Prince’s murderer. But he had no proof, nor did he see how proof could be obtained, unless the murderer was flustered into some ill-judged action. Blount’s inquiries about a second source of poison might do this; or again, it might not: it depended, really, upon the murderer’s nerve—would this person, who so far had remained so cleverly quiescent, who had made so little attempt to cover up, or to trail red herrings, and therefore had avoided the most flagrant kind of self-betrayal, would this person be goaded into action by Blount’s last inquiry, which must convey the hint that the police now had come perilously near to discovering the murder method?

  Jolting up empty Baker Street on the top of his bus, Nigel was thinking desperately hard. From now on, every word of his must be directed to one end, to prising the murderer, like an otter from his holt, out of the security of silence, inaction, acquiescence, out into the open. He knew that he was dealing with a mind of great intelligence and subtlety. Indeed, it was one of the difficulties which had faced the police all through their investigation—that, as far as the death of Nita Prince went, there had been a general lying low, a relative absence of the gossip, the exhibitionism, the hysteria, the bogus confessions, the charges and counter-charges, on which they would normally rely for information. And this was because the suspects were all, with the possible exception of Edgar Billson, persons of high intelligence: moreover, they had been working together for some years now in a small, successful group, whose esprit de corps, though they would not all admit it, had affected each of them as individuals, creating a certain resistance to any influence from outside which tended to criticise or threaten the group as a whole.

  How far was it true to say that the Director himself had been responsible for this esprit de corps? Without question, his was the creative mind of the Division. His flair for the kind of visual propaganda with which they were concerned was extraordinary: he had created, one might almost say, a new mode of propaganda, and the productions of the Division were all stamped with his personality. His charm and tact, besides, had proved indispensable, not only in keeping the wheels of the organisation well oiled, in smoothing over the differences which sometimes arose between the temperamental members of his staff, but in “selling” his own conception of propaganda to other Government Departments. It was not difficult to understand his success, before the war, as chairman of the National Committee for Public Relations in Industry—that cumbrously-named body which had been set up in the middle thirties to boost British products abroad. But, in so far as esprit de corps meant fighting spirit, Nigel inclined to think that the Division owed it more to Harker Fortescue than to Jimmy Lake. It was Hark’ee’s driving power which had got them through the blitzes and the long hours of work, Hark’ee’s painstaking examination of every detail of every job which had kept them all up to the mark, Hark’ee’s firmness and pugnacity that had fought Jimmy’s creative ideas through the resistance so often in the earlier days manifested by Government Departments, each of which possessed its own Public Relations Staff suspicious or jealous of the growing prestige of the Ministry of Morale.

  Such were Nigel’s thoughts as, alighting from the bus, he walked through the July sunshine round the curve of the noble crescent at the far end of which stood the Lakes’ house. The stucco was discoloured and peeling, the magnificent row of houses was gapped in two places where bombs had fallen; but its grandeur had not departed from the place.

  Nigel rang the bell of Number 35. Alice Lake herself answered it. She did not look particularly surprised at his visit, though she could not have been expecting it.

  “Oh, hallo,” she said in her cool way. “Do you want to see Jimmy? He’s up. He got up yesterday, though I don’t suppose it’s very good for him, so soon after——” Her voice trailed away, as though she had already lost interest in the subject.

  “I really want to see you both.”

  “Oh. I was writing. It’s a damned nuisance, my daily woman not coming on Sundays. I like to write every morning, you see, when I’m at work on a book. Otherwise I lose touch with my characters. Is it important?”

  “Well, yes. It is rather. Though I wouldn’t like to say it was more important than one of your novels.”

  “I hope you don’t use ‘important’ in the reviewers’ sense. I should hate to think I was an ‘important novelist.’ It opens up such dreary vistas of social realism, and starkness, and well-meant tedium.” She opened the door of Jimmy’s study. “Here’s Mr. Strangeways. He wants to talk to us,” she announced.

  Jimmy rose from his chair. His left arm was in a sling. Without seeming to make any effort, he created a warmth of welcome, of solicitude almost, for Nigel, very much in contrast with his wife’s off-hand manner. He had that magical touch which comes from inherited good breeding and acquired success: there was something hypnotic in it—soothing and stimulating at once.

  “This is a nuisance about Hark’ee,” he said. “The Superintendent was telling me. Of course it’s idiotic to suppose the old boy was trafficking with the enemy: but one can understand they’re not very keen for him to stay in his job while he’s still under the faintest suspicion. What can we do about it? The Minister is rather fussed too.”

  “I don’t really know. I’d be in favour of hushing it up and keeping Hark’ee on. After all, it’s not for much longer. And no doubt he’d be under surveillance of some kind.”

  “Ye-es. The fact is I can’t do without him. The Division can’t. Things are disorganised enough as it is, and the doctor won’t let me go back for a week at least. I feel pretty well all right again, but I suppose being stabbed does take it out of one more than one supposes.”

  Nigel got the impression that Jimmy was angling for a little wifely comfort and solicitude here. If so, he did not get it. Alice Lake, sitting at the opposite side of the fireplace, hands folded in her lap, hardly seemed to be attending at all. Her eyes were abstracted, inwardly brooding perhaps upon the characters she had left upstairs in her writing-room. There was an aimless moment of silence, which Nigel broke by saying flatly:

  “It’s rather a nuisance about that cyanide capsule of yours, too.”

  “Oh, my pill? Yes.” The Director laughed gently. “Though I must say I can’t think what the police are driving at. Do they believe the—the poisoning was not done with that thing Charles brought along? I can’t make sense of it. Or is it just what they call routine investi
gation?”

  “Blunt has some theory he’s very keen on. Did you have just the one capsule—in the house, I mean?”

  Nigel’s question produced a queer change of atmosphere. There seemed something apologetic in Jimmy’s affirmative reply. Alice sat quite still, her delicate small head turned away from them.

  “But, my dear girl”—Jimmy was now addressing her directly, a faint note of exasperation in his voice—“you weren’t on the Nazi Black List. Alice feels bad because I hadn’t provided a pill for her as well,” he explained to Nigel.

  “I don’t think Mr. Strangeways can be interested in these domestic shortages,” said Alice in a voice like a tinkle of ice.

  She has wit, but no sense of humour, reflected Nigel: a genuine satirist.

  “You didn’t know of the existence of this capsule?” he asked her.

  “Not till yesterday afternoon.”

  “Did any one know about it?”

  “Hark’ee did. I mean, we arranged our suicide pact together,” replied Jimmy, smiling gently. “I don’t see how any one else could have known. I kept the thing in a locked drawer in my dressing-room. In a little pill-box with ‘Poison’ written on it. Just in case any one should——”

  “And the key of the drawer?”

  “Oh, that’s on my ring. And my key-ring stays in my pocket. Except at night, when I put it on my dressing-table.”

  “When did you last look in that drawer—look in the pillbox, I mean, to make sure the capsule was there?”

  “Ages ago. About a year ago, I should think it was.”

  “Did Hark’ee tell you he’d destroyed his one?”

  “No—yes, of course he did. On V.E. Day.”

  The Director shook with one of his silent laughs, remembering no doubt Harker Fortescue’s ceremony of disposal.

  “I’m sorry to be asking all these tiresome questions over again. No doubt the Superintendent asked them all yesterday. But would you mind telling me, Mrs. Lake, when your brother came to fetch you along to the Ministry, the morning Miss Prince was murdered, did he stay long? I mean, was he here for long before you set off?”

  “What you really mean,” said Alice Lake, with her cold clear eyes fastened directly upon him, “is, did he go up alone to my husband’s dressing-room, I suppose?”

  “Well, did he?”

  “No. He was only here for five or ten minutes, and he was with me all the time, and then we left.”

  “Did he say anything to you about Miss Prince that morning? Anything about having visited her the night before? Or their engagement being broken off?”

  “I don’t know that I care for these questions very much,” said Mrs. Lake.

  “You certainly don’t have to answer them. I’ve no official standing in the case. I realise they’re rather impertinent. But I do want to find out who killed that girl.”

  “Oh? Why?” Alice Lake shot it at him flatly, her delicate features quite impassive. The question might have been one of pure intellectual curiosity, for all the emotion she showed.

  “My dear girl,” Jimmy put in, “don’t be so Bloomsbury.”

  His wife entirely ignored this, continuing to gaze full in Nigel’s eyes as if waiting for a rational answer to her question, but with small expectation of there being one.

  “Because,” replied Nigel, “if Blount’s theory is correct, a person I like and respect is guilty of a peculiarly atrocious murder. I should prefer that Blount was not correct.”

  For once, Alice Lake seemed a little disconcerted.

  “Aren’t all murders ‘peculiarly atrocious ’?” she said hurriedly. “No, I suppose not. What they call the crime of passion—I dare say there may be excuses for that. Poor girl, she must have been very trying, by all accounts.”

  “All whose accounts?”

  “Oh, Charles’. And Jimmy’s.”

  The Director, who had been stirring uneasily in his chair, said:

  “Alice, if you persevere with these disinterested reflections on the case, you’ll find yourself accusing me of a crime passionel.”

  “Well, Jimmy, I should be almost relieved to know you had it in you. Surprised, anyway. You’ve taken the poor girl’s death so calmly.”

  “Why, damn it, do you expect me to be in a permanent state of hysterics? That’s the last thing you would like.”

  “No, but——” She bit her lip. “Mr. Strangeways must find this all very embarrassing and interesting. Of course I know you didn’t do it, Jimmy”—her husband’s face lit up, rather pathetically, but the light went out the next moment as she continued—“because. I saw that poison-container thing on your table, and you couldn’t have used it after that because Miss Prince had taken her cup away before you came back to the table.”

  “It might have been nice,” murmured Jimmy, “if you could have brought yourself to believe in my innocence without having to have it proved to you by the police.”

  Nigel was conscious, more acutely than ever, of an invisible gulf yawning between the pair—a gulf across which the husband made gestures of conciliation, tenderness, appeal, only to find the figure on the other side either disregarding or coldly analysing them. Nigel at this moment felt genuinely sorry for Jimmy Lake. He said:

  “I’m afraid it isn’t so simple as that, Mrs. Lake. If Blount’s theory is correct, Nita Prince was not poisoned by means of that container of your brother’s at all. So everyone is under suspicion again.”

  “Oh, lord,” said Jimmy, in some consternation, “I thought all that stuff about the poison pill wasn’t just routine inquiry. But why? It’s mad. Why should any one bring his own poison along when there was poison there, on tap, so to speak?”

  “I can’t imagine,” said Nigel, who was inwardly reflecting how fluently—in his own case, at any rate—one lie led to another. “But Blount is a remarkably intelligent and pertinacious sort of chap, and if he——”

  “I think,” said Alice Lake, whose hands were now folded deeper and tighter in her lap, “I think if you don’t mind, Jimmy, I’d better have a little talk with Mr. Strangeways in private. Would you come up to my room?” she asked, rising briskly from her chair.

  Turning back at the doorway, Nigel caught a curious expression on the Director’s face. Anger, was it? Or disappointment? Or fear? Or a kind of brooding disillusionment? A bit of them all, may be.

  “I’m afraid it’s at the top of the house,” said Alice Lake, as she started up the stairs.

  “What a lovely house it is. Difficult to warm in winter though, I should think.”

  “Oh, we have quite a good boiler for the central heating.”

  “But no fuel or boilerman nowadays, I suppose?”

  “Jimmy stokes it up in the evening. When we have it on, I mean. We ration ourselves to three hot baths a week. It’s a nuisance not having a geyser.”

  After climbing several flights of stairs, the rooms on the third and fourth floors being all shut up, Mrs. Lake told him, for the duration of the war, they reached her eyrie, a work-room composed of two or three servants’ bedrooms knocked into one. Here, from the top of the house, there was a magnificent view over Regent’s Park. This view seemed the only concession made to the aesthetic sense, for the room itself was bare, almost anti-septic in the impression it made upon the visitor. A large kitchen table, littered with notes and sheets of foolscap paper, to which Alice Lake’s eye at once automatically turned: an electric fire: a battered basket chair and a few hard ones: a few built-in book-shelves: the walls were cream-washed, and not one picture hung upon them.

  “It certainly is a work-room,” said Nigel.

  “You find it rather forbidding? That’s the idea. It keeps people—my husband’s friends—out. I need a barbed-wire fence on the landing, really. You’ve no idea how, if you’re a writer—a woman writer specially— people assume your time is all at their disposal. One has to fight tooth and nail for it. I don’t mean you, of course. Do sit down. There are cigarettes on the mantelpiece.”

  Alice Lak
e sat on the hard chair by the kitchen table. Her eye roved once again to the papers on it; then she firmly pushed them away, like a temptation.

  “Tell me, Mr. Strangeways, do you—is it my husband the police suspect?”

  “I don’t know who their chief suspect is at the moment. Honestly.”

  Alice clasped her hands in her lap, and turned to him full-face.

  “You were asking about my brother just now. I didn’t like to talk about him in front of Jimmy. That morning he came to fetch me—he did say something about Nita Prince.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well, there wasn’t much time to talk: he was only here ten minutes: and then in the taxi to the Ministry. But he did ask me if I intended to press for a divorce. I didn’t, of course, as you know.”

  “He’d been discussing the situation with Nita?”

  “Yes, the night before. He told you so.”

  “I mean, he told you then that he’d discussed it with her the previous night?”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, he did say he’d seen her since returning to England, though he didn’t tell me the circumstances.”

  “Circumstances?”

  “That dressing-up nonsense.”

  “Did you get the impression that Nita had tried to enlist him as an intermediary over the divorce?”

  Alice Lake seemed to consider this, as an abstract proposition, or a possible situation, it might be, in one of her own novels.

  “No. Not exactly,” she replied after a pause. “I thought he was sounding me about it for—well, for his own interest.”

  “He was still interested in Nita himself, in fact?”

  “You could interpret it that way, I suppose. Yes, of course he was. But I’m sure he had no idea of holding her to her engagement.”

  “If Jimmy had left her, gone back to you, would Charles have married her, do you think?”

  “Oh, that’s pure speculation,” she said, reprovingly almost, in her high, light voice. “It’s difficult to think of him as the marrying type—difficult for me, I mean. But I’m probably too close to him to see him clearly.”