A Press of Suspects Read online

  He sauntered in past the front box, a faint smile still illuminating his face. The commissionaire on duty looked up. “Oh, the inspector’s been asking for you, Mr. Jessop.”

  The smile faded. Jessop felt no apprehension, but he was slightly startled all the same. “Thanks, Sarge,” he said. He couldn’t imagine what Haines would want him for. Some trifling routine matter, no doubt. He climbed to the second floor and knocked boldly at the door on which hung a big card with Haines’s name on it.

  The inspector called “Come in” and turned from the window as he entered. “Yes?” he said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Edgar Jessop. I understand you’ve been asking for me.” Jessop looked at the inspector with interest. So this was his main adversary—the mercenary hired by his enemies to fight their battle. Well, he looked harmless enough—he might well be somebody’s kindly old uncle rather than a policeman. Jessop felt fully equal to dealing with him.

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Jessop, I’m glad you’ve called in.” Haines pulled up a chair for him. “There was just one small point I wanted you to clear up for me.”

  “Of course, if I can,” said Jessop.

  “I believe Mr. Iredale was with you just before lunch to-day?”

  “That is so,” said Jessop. There was something about the inspector’s level gaze that he found disconcerting after all, and to his annoyance he felt his pulse beginning to hammer.

  “He had a luncheon appointment—you knew that, of course?”

  “Yes—he told me.” Jessop sat very still, waiting. Could this be a trap of some sort?”

  “But he was about five minutes late. I gather you detained him.” Haines accompanied the question with a friendly smile and began putting his papers together. This was the merest routine, and he was tired. He’d had a long day. “Is that so?”

  Jessop hesitated. An appalling possibility had suddenly leapt into view—the possibility that he might be lifted out of the anonymous crowd and have one particular action of his subjected to suspicious scrutiny. If the inspector thought that Iredale had been kept away from the lunch deliberately, he’d want an explanation.

  “I don’t know that I detained him,” said Jessop with a forced smile. “We were just talking, you know.”

  Haines stopped fiddling with his papers, and his face lost its benevolent expression. He looked at Jessop quickly and began to light his pipe. “It’s not of any importance, of course,” he said between puffs. “Mr. Iredale said something about a manuscript you insisted he should look at.”

  Jessop felt a stirring of his old resentment. The suggestion that he had pressed his opus upon Iredale was true enough, but there had been no call for Bill to be so slighting about it. In fact Bill oughtn’t to have mentioned it at all; it had been shown to him in confidence.

  “I asked him if he’d care to see it,” said Jessop, “that’s all. He seemed interested and we discussed it for a bit.”

  Haines frowned. “I’d like to get this quite clear, Mr. Jessop. Mr. Iredale distinctly gave me the impression that he was late for lunch because you pressed your manuscript upon him and he felt he couldn’t leave without discourtesy.”

  Jessop flushed. “That’s absurd,” he said. “We’re old friends—I shouldn’t have minded at all.”

  “Evidently he thought you would. He was in a hurry to get away, I take it?”

  “Not particularly. As a matter of fact, it didn’t seem to me that he was very keen on going to the lunch.”

  “I see.” Haines concentrated on his pipe for a few seconds. “All right, Mr. Jessop, that’s really all I wanted you for. I should be grateful if you’d keep the subject of this interview to yourself. Thank you for coming.”

  Jessop went out moodily. The afterglow had faded. He felt angry with Iredale. He’d made a great effort to save Iredale’s life—yes, at some risk to himself, that was clear. And what was the result? Disparaging remarks about his opus. The sort of thing one might expect from Cardew or Ede. They were all alike—he couldn’t get a square deal from anyone. His eyes narrowed, and his hand sought comfort in the flat tin he carried in his pocket. His thoughts, that had been so tranquil, began to turn again to violence.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On his way into the building next morning Haines stopped to have a word with the commissionaire at the box, a grey-haired veteran of some ancient war whom everyone called “Sarge,” though his name was Vickers.

  “Just come on duty?” asked Haines pleasantly.

  “A couple of hours ago, sir. Eight till four’s my shift.” The man spoke with a brisk cheerfulness that was obviously natural to him; then suddenly his face dropped and his tones became hushed and confidential. “This is a bad business, eh, sir? Never ’ad anything like it ’appen in all the time I’ve been ’ere.”

  “I don’t suppose you have, Sarge.”

  “Couldn’t sleep last night for thinkin’ about it.” Vickers moved a little closer to the inspector. “One thing I can tell you,” he said earnestly. “It wasn’t no stranger what did for Mr. ’Ind. We’d ’ ave knowed if there was anyone in the building what ’adn’t no business there.”

  “I was going to ask you about that.” Haines had had no reason to change his view that the killing of Hind had been an “inside” job, but the possibility that the murderer might have been someone only indirectly or formerly connected with the paper could not be excluded. “How do you manage to keep a check on everyone?” he asked.

  “It’s ’abit, sir. Like the coppers at the ’Ouses of Parliament, we gets to know all the faces pretty quick. Mind you, we can’t say at any pertickler time which of the staff’s in the building and which ain’t. They come and go so fast it ain’t possible to keep track. But strangers, now—that’s different. Anyone coming in ’ ere that we don’t know gets stopped, and believe me, there ain’t no sneaking in. We ’ave to be careful, you know—lot o’ mad people come to newspaper offices. You’d ’ardly credit it without you saw it yourself. Only last week we ’ad a girl said she was in telepathetic communication with the planet Venus. According to ’er, she’d learned the songs what they sing up there, and so ’elp me, she wanted to sing ’em to the Editor.” Vickers scratched the side of his chin reminiscently. “Nice bit of ’ omework she was, too—aside of being quite balmy, o’ course. When it comes to customers like that we’ve got eyes in the back of our ’eads. ’Ave to ’ave.”

  Haines smiled. “So there weren’t any strangers in the office yesterday morning?”

  “Well, sir, there was one or two called in, but they didn’t amount to much. We ’ ave a waiting-room over there, see. What ’appens is they send a slip up to the News Room stating their business, and one of the reporters comes down and talks to ’ em, and then if they’ve got anything to say what’s worth anything, they’re taken upstairs. But nobody went upstairs yesterday morning at all. Reg’lar poor lot, they were.”

  “I see. Tell me, Sarge, suppose someone had called who had worked here once but didn’t any longer, would you have noticed him, or would he have got by like one of the staff?”

  “I reckon we’d notice him even more than we would a stranger,” said Vickers, adding wisely, “There’s nothing like a familiar face what didn’t ought to be there to make you look twice. Anyway, no one like that called yesterday morning.”

  “What about friends and relatives of the staff—wives and so on?”

  Vickers shook his head. “No, sir, not yesterday.”

  “Well, it’s something to know that. Thank you, Sarge.” Haines nodded and went on his way satisfied.

  He found the second-floor office looking more like the statistical section of a big business house than the headquarters of a murder investigation. Extra desks and chairs had been brought in, and more than a dozen plain-clothes men were hard at work among piles of papers, notebooks and coloured filing cards, completing and collating the results of the inquiries they had made on the previous day. There was a steady hum of activity in the air. Sergeant Miles was dictatin
g in a gruff undertone to a man at a typewriter. Nothing in this quiet methodical scene indicated that the aim of all these people was to hang a man by the neck until he was dead.

  Inspector Ogilvie, conductor-in-chief of the statistical orchestra, came forward as Haines entered. He was in his shirt-sleeves, he was beginning to need a shave, and his eyes showed signs of fatigue.

  “Had a tough night, Inspector?” asked Haines sympathetically.

  “As a matter of fact, sir,” Ogilvie confided, “I’d hardly noticed it was over. We didn’t finish the interviews till eleven, and we’ve been piecing the bits together ever since. We’re getting near the end now, though—I think I’ll be able to give you the complete picture in a few minutes. By the way, the fingerprint report has just come in. It’s disappointing, as usual.”

  Haines took the document over to the window and skimmed through it. The findings were very much what he’d expected. The plate on which the olives had been found had only a few smudged prints. The mass of prints on furniture and door-handles were equally useless. One or two good prints on some of the plates and cutlery probably belonged to the restaurant staff, and were being checked.

  “I don’t know why we still bother with these things,” said Haines. “Criminals know too much—I don’t think I’ve had a helpful fingerprint since the year the war ended, not on this sort of case, anyway. We’d do better to cast a horoscope!” He handed the document back to Ogilvie. “It’s fairly clear what happened. The chap must have taken the olives along in some container, tipped them out on to the plate, and carried the plate to the sideboard in a handkerchief or something. After all, why should he leave prints? He wouldn’t hang about—I dare say the whole job only took about twenty seconds. He wouldn’t need to touch anything but the plate. Well, there we are, Inspector. I must say I’m much more concerned over the cyanide report. I really did think we’d traced the stuff.”

  “That shook me, too,” said Ogilvie. “After all the work I’d done in the Process Department, it was like a stab in the back. If that supply’s ruled out, I’m blessed if I know where we start looking.”

  They sat down by the window, and Haines told Ogilvie about his own interviews on the previous day. Presently the hum in the room began to die down and men began putting on their jackets. There was an air of expectant achievement, such as that which precedes the declaration of a poll. Sergeant Miles came over with a bunch of typed sheets. “That seems to be it, sir.” He passed it to Ogilvie, who paged through it.

  “Well, Chief,” said the inspector, “here is the position. There are one hundred and ninety-two people who normally work in this building. That’s the figure the Secretary gave us, and I’ve checked all the names with the pay-roll. There are five more who’ve left within the past two years, and they’ve all got alibis. By the way, one of them is Lambert, the Foreign Editor who changed his job. He’s on holiday in the Scilly Islands.”

  “Fine—it’s a pity a few more weren’t,” said Haines.

  “Oh, we haven’t done badly out of holidays—there were fourteen away altogether. They didn’t give us much trouble, and they’re all okay. We checked by telephone with the hotels. Three people were away ill yesterday, and they’re all accounted for. Seventeen people didn’t come on duty till the afternoon, but one or two lunched in town, and they haven’t all got alibis. To cut a long story short—you’ll see all the details for yourself—we’re satisfied that one hundred and twenty-four people have complete alibis for the period twelve-thirty to one o’clock—in fact, from twelve-twenty—I thought I’d better allow a little margin to be on the safe side. That leaves sixty-eight members of the staff without alibis—fifty-two men and sixteen women.”

  Haines gave a low whistle. “Sixty-eight! I’d hoped it would be fewer than that.”

  “I was pretty tough about it, sir, as you said. In some cases there are only a few minutes of the half-hour not vouched for by others, and of course quite good stories to explain how the time was spent, but not stories that could be checked.” He passed the bundle of papers across.

  Haines began to go through the list. “At least,” he said, “I don’t seem to have been wasting all my time. No alibi for Iredale, Cardew, Pringle, Jessop …” He ran his finger slowly down the long column. “By jove, though, it’s pretty formidable, isn’t it? The women don’t seem to come out too well.”

  “No,” said Ogilvie, “I think that’s because they’re mostly secretaries and so on, and they go off to powder their noses before one o’ clock. A lot of them eat in the restaurant at about that time, anyway, and one of them could easily have slipped into the Directors’ Dining Room on her way up.”

  Haines’s eyes were still on the papers. “Now I would have thought that Miss Timmins would have had her nose to the grindstone for that half-hour, with Ede still around.”

  Ogilvie shook his head. “She was one of the powderers. She went out for a couple of minutes after Ede had taken Munro into his room. In any case, she sits alone in her office—we couldn’t get any corroboration.”

  “Of course not. Ah!—no alibi for Sheila Brooks.”

  “She just missed it, sir. She was positive she was in the Reporters’ Room all the time, but on investigation we found she went up to the library to get a reference book. She’s an eyeful, isn’t she?”

  Haines grunted. “None for Katharine Camden, either.”

  “No—she was wandering around the office looking for Hind.”

  “H’m. Let’s see, there were a couple of girls …” Haines found the note he had made during his conversation with Pringle. “Rose—oh, no, she’s the one that went to Arkansas. Penelope—that’ll be Penelope Walker, number 38. Oh, she’s out, I see. And Phyllis somebody—Phyllis Stokes, that’ll be, I suppose. She’s out, too. Well, so much for Mr. Pringle!”

  “Suspects, sir?” Ogilvie never liked to feel that he was not being kept fully informed.

  “Not really. Victims, I’m told, of Hind’s baser instincts. Hallo, no alibi for Ede? Wasn’t he entertaining Munro?”

  “Not until a quarter to one,” said Ogilvie. “He went back to his room at twelve-thirty as soon as the conference was over, had a word or two with the Art Editor, and then rushed off to see the Features Editor. I’ve never known such a place for rushing about—it’s a ruddy anthill. Munro’s all right, of course. I checked very carefully on him, as you said, but it appears that he was under observation from the moment he stepped over the threshold.”

  Haines nodded. “Well, I congratulate you, Ogilvie. You’ve done a good job on this—very thorough.”

  Oglivie didn’t seem so satisfied with his work. “I think it’s sound enough, sir, but where do we go from here?”

  “I think you’d better get a bit of shut-eye, Inspector—and those chaps of yours. After lunch, I suppose we’ll have to start combing through these sixty-eight again. We may not be able to rule any of them out, but some of them must be a good deal less likely than others. These office boys, for instance—what possible motive could they have had? Anyway, I’d say this was a man-sized murder.”

  Ogilvie shrugged. “I’d say, sir, that after nearly twenty-four hours we haven’t a clue.”

  Haines looked a bit grim. “I’m afraid that’s about the literal truth,” he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The atmosphere in the Reporters’ Room late in the afternoon did not suggest any deep feeling of deprivation as a result of Hind’s death. Though the late News Editor had been held in professional respect by most of his staff, it was now evident that there had been little affection for him. Yesterday there had been a certain solemnity in the air, for even to reporters, who thrive on sensation, murder on the premises is disquieting. But discussion had soon become detached and even a shade callous, and the incident was now no more than an uneasy background to conversation. Sheila Brooks, to everyone’s relief, had absented herself for a few days.

  Work was proceeding in a very desultory fashion, for with the approach of the August ho
liday, news had dried up. In any case, the fussy, conscientious Soames had not yet got into his stride as Hind’s successor, and the reporters were taking advantage of the lull. Haycock, a veteran with a bald and shiny scalp, was somnolently turning the pages of a copy of Life. Golightly, a lanky, restless man of thirty, was back from his treasure-hunt, which had proved a flop, and was inscribing what appeared to be a motto or legend in coloured inks on a piece of cardboard. Grant was winnowing an enormous stack of competition postcards on which readers of the Morning Call had been invited, for a prize of ten guineas, to state “How I proposed” or “How he proposed” in a hundred well-chosen words. Rogers, a smart, good-looking youth and one of Nature’s irrepressibles, had been out all morning, and was now preparing to transcribe an interview. Katharine Camden, who had been covering an archery contest, was bored at having to write it up and was ready to be diverted by anyone or anything.

  Pringle, seated a little apart from the others, was consuming weak tea and charcoal biscuits and trying by the nonchalance of his manner to convey the impression that there was nothing remarkable about his presence in the office at an hour when he would normally have been coining expenses in absentia. He hadn’t quite decided yet whether to close down his racket and hope that Ede would forget about it in his preoccupation with Hind’s murder, or whether to go ahead and cash in as quickly as he could before he was sacked.

  Besides Pringle, there were a couple of intruders. Bill Iredale, who was finding the Reporters’ Room increasingly congenial, had dropped in after lunch and was sitting next to Katharine at the desk of the absent Sheila. Jessop was there too, driven out of the Foreign Room by Cardew’s presence. All that day, hatred had been rising in him like a head of steam. The trouble was that this time he couldn’t leave the choice to Providence, and he had so many enemies that it was difficult to decide where to strike next. His anger was easily diverted to some new person by a chance remark or action—like Cardew occupying the desk that he should have had. He sat quietly, trying to focus his resentment, while the conversation flowed round him.