A Press of Suspects Read online

  Bello:

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  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

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  Contents

  Andrew Garve

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Andrew Garve

  A Press of Suspects

  Andrew Garve

  Andrew Garve is the pen name of Paul Winterton (1908–2001). He was born in Leicester and educated at the Hulme Grammar School, Manchester and Purley County School, Surrey, after which he took a degree in Economics at London University. He was on the staff of The Economist for four years, and then worked for fourteen years for the London News Chronicle as reporter, leader writer and foreign correspondent. He was assigned to Moscow from 1942–5, where he was also the correspondent of the BBC’s Overseas Service.

  After the war he turned to full-time writing of detective and adventure novels and produced more than forty-five books. His work was serialized, televised, broadcast, filmed and translated into some twenty languages. He is noted for his varied and unusual backgrounds – which have included Russia, newspaper offices, the West Indies, ocean sailing, the Australian outback, politics, mountaineering and forestry – and for never repeating a plot.

  Andrew Garve was a founder member and first joint secretary of the Crime Writers’ Association.

  Chapter One

  At the wetter end of Fleet Street, close by the Crown Inn and not far from the famous Cheshire Cheese, there is a five-storey red brick building which houses the London Morning Call, a national newspaper with a certified daily net sale of nearly two million copies. Though the paper is popular, no one has ever been known to say a good word for the building in which it is produced—a late-Victorian monstrosity of classic ugliness with an incongruous flesh-pink filling where a hole blown in the structure by a delayed-action bomb in 1941 has been repaired.

  In addition to being unsightly, the building is inconvenient for its purpose. Its interior may have been functional enough in the leisurely days when reporters travelled to work in top hats and morning coats, and leader-writers fulminated with a bottle of port at the elbow, but its dark narrow passages, steep stone stairs, antiquated lifts and multitude of small rooms with heavy mahogany doors are quite unsuited to the production of a modern newspaper. The directors have long intended to pull the whole place down and build on its site a worthy neighbour to the black-and-shiny Daily Express and the dignified Daily Telegraph, but having missed their chance before the war they now face insuperable problems of temporary accommodation and building licences. They have therefore had to content themselves with such interior improvements as the modernisation of the plumbing and the provision of additional amenities for the higher-placed executives.

  On a hot Monday evening in late July, 1949, there was the usual lull in office activity as seven o’clock approached. The work of the day staff was almost done and the work of the night staff had barely started. It was the hour of editorial slack water, when those who were going to see the paper through the presses took over from those who had planned it in outline.

  The specialists had already begun to trickle out past the green-uniformed commissionaire at the front box; the Literary Editor first, with an armful of review copies; the Sports Editor, who had a darts match to play off at his “local”; the Agricultural Correspondent, who owned a farm and made a useful profit writing about his losses; and the Columnist, who did very much as he liked. The Open Air Correspondent, whose accounts of arduous hikes personally undertaken were at once an example and stimulus to the rising generation, was starting up his car in the office garage preparatory to the effortless exploration of yet another route. Upstairs, other privileged experts with rooms of their own and names on their doors were jingling their keys and reaching for their hats. The Leader Writer had just been handed a damp galley proof by a white-aproned printer and was concentrating on the last and most trying stage of his normally unexacting job—the excision of three superfluous inches from a column that could spare almost any three inches without irreparable harm. In a few minutes, he too would be gone.

  In the News Room, pressure had cased. The News Editor had handed over most of his problems to the Night News Editor, and in spirit was already having a drink with his pretty new girl reporter. One or two people drifted in and out on final missions—to get an expense account signed, or a draft letter approved, or just to say “Good-night” before departing. The Diplomatic Correspondent strolled in to tell the Night News Editor that he would be at the Savoy if wanted. The Night News Editor was studying the night rota, reflecting on the dullness of the news, and privately hoping for a big fire or explosion with heavy loss of life. The undersized youth whose job it was to tear off the ticker tape had sensed the temporary preoccupation of authority and was buried in a lurid “Western”.

  The Reporters’ Room, separated from the News Room by a glass door, was as untidy as a battlefield. Despite the dearth of big stories—or perhaps because of it—a busy day had evidently been had by all. Old newspapers, clippings from the Library, reference books, telephone directories and mounds of copy paper were piled in disorder on the desks between the typewriters—a cleaner’s nightmare. Huge waste-paper baskets overflowed like horns of plenty. On the floor beside one of the chairs a dozen sheets of discarded copy paper were scattered, each with the single unfinished sentence, “An unparalleled nation-wide scheme …” or as a variant, “A nationwide scheme which will revolutionise …” Someone had evidently been in creative travail here. On the Chief Reporter’s desk, a printed card in a holder read “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but if you are it helps.” In one of the many telephone boxes which lined the walls, a shorthand-writer was taking a story from Rome. Two day-staff reporters, about to go off duty, were playing cricket with a paper ball and a broken chair leg. The pretty girl reporter was keeping an eye on the glass door and polishing her nails. By the window, where a million specks of dust floated in a shaft of evening sunlight, one of the night men who had just come on duty was unaccountably cleaning his shoes. Presently the door opened, a colleague from another department gave a peremptory,
intimate jerk of the head to the two cricketers, and the three of them departed for the Crown.

  Across the passage, the Sub-editors were sorting and savouring bits of copy in a desultory way, exchanging pleasantries while they still had the leisure to do so, and chaffing a waitress who had come down from the office restaurant with the supper menu. Some of them were quiet, respectable family men; men with neat houses at Streatham and Penge; pale men who rode on night trams and had almost forgotten what a beauty sleep felt like; amiable, worthy men, who drank a great deal of tea and whose thoughts dwelt much on pensions. Others stoked secret fires and contemplated personal or professional adventures. The view widely held among the reporters that the Subs were smug, stodgy and dim-witted almost to a man was the result of prejudice rather than of dispassionate observation.

  Along the corridor, the deep peace of the Foreign Room was broken only by the sound of the tape machine ticking out the “cold war” round by round. The inevitable boy crouched by the machine. The Assistant Foreign Editor sat in watchful contemplation of the clock, for he had an appointment with the Editor in five minutes’ time. The Features Department—the mahogany door a few yards along the corridor—had temporarily closed down, and a note pencilled on a pad beside a wet page proof said “Gone to CEN 43029”—in short, to the Crown.

  At the end of the passage, the hard-working Assistant Editor was discussing the “make-up” of the paper with the Night Editor. They were not aware of any lull. The Editor, a couple of doors away, was winding up the administrative work of the day. As was his custom at this hour, he was seeing members of the staff whose problems had been crowded out by the day’s rush. In the adjoining room, his secretary worked on as steadily and imperturbably as though she had just come on duty.

  Chapter Two

  Precisely at a quarter to seven, Edgar Jessop, the Assistant Foreign Editor, put on his jacket and prepared to keep his appointment. He was a neat, spare man of less than average height. From his general appearance his age might have been anything from forty-five to fifty-five, but in fact he was an embittered forty-two. People who had known him in his youth would scarcely have recognised him now. Then he had been pleasant-looking in an unobtrusive, dapper sort of way, with thick dark hair, mild hazel eyes, and a smile that gained him all the friends he needed. Now his hair, meticulously parted in the middle, was uniformly grey, and so scanty as hardly to warrant the repeated gesture with which his right hand smoothed it back. His face had a drained look, a bleached papyrus-quality under its light tan, like that of an English child brought up in a hot country. His eyes, unless their interest was directly challenged, were for long periods expressionless, as though all his thoughts turned inwards. Only the sardonic droop of his mouth below the long clean-shaven upper lip gave any clue to the nature of those thoughts. In his rather timid manner there was certainly no hint of the nervous vitality that made him as potentially dangerous as a high-tension cable. Outwardly he was just an insignificant little man who looked as though worry and premature middle-age had got him down a bit.

  He gave a short instruction to the boy in charge of the tape and walked quickly along the corridor. He felt anxious, and was uncomfortably aware of a pounding pulse. This interview mattered a great deal to him. The Foreign Editor of the Morning Call, a man named Lambert, had just left to join another paper, and Jessop hoped to move into his vacant post. He was, he had told himself a score of times, fully entitled to it; if he didn’t get it, it would be grossly unfair. But he had been passed over so often already that he couldn’t help feeling apprehensive. Luck had always been dead against him, and the high-ups had been slow to recognise his abilities.

  He turned the knob of the secretary’s door and saw with relief that Miss Timmins was alone. Sometimes at this hour she had to control an unruly mob, like the janitor at a stage-door; and he wanted to get his ordeal over quickly. He directed an inquiring glance at the inner room. “Is he free?” His voice was thin, his enunciation precise.

  “He’s got Mr. Iredale with him,” said Miss Timmins, “but I shouldn’t think they’ll be long—they’ve been talking quite a while already.” She gave him an encouraging smile. “I should wait if I were you.” She was a bright little woman in her early forties with a darting, observant glance, a kind heart and an unshakably cheerful disposition. She was slightly over-rouged and her black hair was definitely over-dyed, but her dark dress was the last word in neatness and her collar was startlingly white. Miss Timmins looked her own idea of the perfect secretary.

  Jessop sat down on a hard-backed chair and stared glumly at the floor. Miss Timmins put another sheet of paper in her typewriter. “I’ll have to get a move on with these letters. Mr. Ede will want to sign them directly he’s seen you.”

  “You work too hard,” said Jessop. “You’ll get no thanks for it in this place.”

  Miss Timmins chuckled, and her agile fingers began to clatter over the keys. “No good looking on the gloomy side, Mr. Jessop. Do things cheerfully and they don’t come so hard, that’s what I say.”

  The office was in fact Miss Timmins’s life. She had sat in that ante-room for more than twenty years; she had served several editors, though none, in her view, more pleasant than Mr. Ede; she knew everything that went on in the office and enjoyed the confidences of half the staff. By normal standards she was grossly overworked, but apart from a regular Friday practice with the Brondesbury Female Choir and an occasional visit to her married sister at Wembley she had nothing particular to do with her evenings and she flourished on overtime and the sense of being needed. The Editor had only to say that he really couldn’t let her take on anything more and she would shoulder the new load happily.

  Above the clicking of her machine the sound of raised voices came suddenly from the inner room. Miss Timmins stopped typing and looked slightly incredulous. It was rare for the Editor to get heated with any members of his staff, but foreign correspondents were notoriously temperamental. They got spoilt living abroad and became too independent. “Mr. Iredale seems to be giving trouble,” she said. “It’s very naughty of him.”

  Jessop listened, conscious of a vicarious excitement as the exchanges grew sharper. He couldn’t make out what was being said, but he could hear Iredale’s tone of angry protest and something very like the sound of a heavy fist being brought down on a desk-top. It was good to hear someone answering back and insisting on his rights.

  “Bill said he was going to have a show-down,” he remarked. “I don’t blame him, either, considering the way he’s been treated.” It was as though he were expressing his own feeling of resentment. “After all, what was the point of sending an experienced man like him to the Outward Islands in the first place if we weren’t going to trust his judgment? And then getting a chit of a girl to write up the story from office clippings—just because he sent something out of line with policy! It makes me sick.”

  “Oh, you’re prejudiced against Katharine,” said Miss Timmins. “I don’t know much about the subject but I read her article and I must say it seemed to make everything nice and clear.”

  “It’s easy to make things clear when you put in only half the facts,” said Jessop sourly. He knew that he was coming to Iredale’s defence when the battle was over, and that he was protesting in the wrong quarter; it gave an added bitterness to his complaint.

  Miss Timmins made a non-committal sound and went on with her typing: She had long ago learned the wisdom of keeping neutral in these recurrent office disputes, though she was quite willing to bandage the wounds. “Anyway,” she said after a few moments, “I expect Mr. Ede knows what he’s doing.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” said Jessop. “He’s still an amateur at this business. So’s Katharine Camden. So are a lot of other people on this paper. Too many damned intellectuals altogether, if you ask me.” Jessop had started his career on the Morning Call as a messenger boy at the age of fourteen, and had learned his job the hard way. He didn’t approve of people who took short-cuts—particularly g
raduates from Oxford.

  “Look how they stick together, too,” he went on “Why do you suppose the Editor took Munro’s view of the riots rather than Bill’s? Do you think it’s because Munro is Governor of the Outward Islands and so ought to know all about them? Not on your life. It’s because Munro was once a leader-writer on this paper and has a couple of degrees and wears the same tie as Ede and they both know a bit of Greek. Whereas Bill, after all, is just a glorified reporter—and a reporter, in Ede’s view, is no better than a literary barrow boy.” Jessop’s eyes had lost their inward look and his mouth twisted contemptuously.

  “That’s right, get it off your chest,” said Miss Timmins cheerfully. “Don’t mind me—I can take it.” She typed a few more lines. “Did you know Mr. Munro was coming to lunch here to-morrow?”

  Jessop’s sardonic expression was momentarily replaced by one of curiosity.

  “Is he?”

  Miss Timmins nodded. “One of the usual office lunches—he’s the guest of honour. It’ll be queer seeing him back here after all this time, won’t it? It seems ages ago that he used to sit in that easy-chair over there, waiting to show his leaders to the Editor.”

  “He didn’t stick it for long, did he?” said Jessop morosely. “He knew which side his bread was buttered. I never could stand the fellow—interfering busy-body!”

  Miss Timmins looked rather disapproving. Mr. Jessop was really being very difficult this evening. She remembered now, though—there had been some trouble between him and Munro long ago. “I suppose that’s why your name’s not down on the list for the luncheon this time, Mr. Jessop,” she remarked.

  Jessop shrugged. “I don’t know about that—someone’s got to bring out the paper. We can’t all sit over liqueurs and cigars until three in the afternoon.” His tone was offhand, but he knew that he hadn’t deceived Miss Timmins. “Who’ll be there, anyway?”