A Press of Suspects Page 3

  Again her laugh rang out. “He’s still waiting. What a man!”

  Iredale nodded. He couldn’t imagine Hind having much success with Katharine, who struck him as being a fastidious type. “Who’s the girl he’s got in tow now, do you know?”

  She glanced across the saloon. “That’s Sheila Brooks—she’s just started as a reporter.”

  “Is she any good?”

  Katharine hesitated. “She’s very young. She’s always wanted to work on a newspaper and she thinks this is the Street of Adventure. I think she could be a nice kid, but Joe’s spoiling her. He gives her the plum jobs and takes her out a lot, and she thinks he’s wonderful and drinks far too much with him because she’s under the impression that it’s the proper thing to do. I’m not just being bitchy. It really is too bad of him.”

  “Somebody ought to keep an eye on her.”

  “Well, I try, but good advice isn’t very palatable, you know.”

  “Damned little fool!” said Iredale, with surprising warmth.

  At that moment, Hind and the girl detached themselves from the crowd and approached a trifle unsteadily across the saloon. Hind was a big man, as big as Iredale, but gross and flabby, with a false-hearty manner and a face like a degenerate Roman emperor. He was laughing, with an exaggerated heaving of his shoulders, at something the flushed girl had said. Sheila had a pretty rounded figure and eyes like bluebells. Just about one good meal, Iredale thought, for a womaniser like Hind.

  The News Editor cast a sidelong look at Katharine as he passed and gave her a half-embarrassed, half-defiant grin. Iredale said quietly, “Still up to your old tricks, Hind?”

  Hind stopped, and lowered his head like a bull. “Any business of yours, Iredale?”

  Iredale looked beyond him to the girl. “If you’ve got any sense, honey child, you’ll watch your step with Mr. Hind—and I’m not joking.”

  Sheila went scarlet. “Well …” she began indignantly. Hind let go her arm and thrust his chin in Iredale’s face. “Why don’t you get back to where you came from, Mr. Know-all?”

  “Why don’t you leave these kids alone?” retorted Iredale, pale with anger. They faced each other, hatred leaping between them.

  “Break it up, you two,” said Katharine urgently. “It’s not exactly private here.”

  Iredale took a reluctant step back to the bar and picked up his beer. Hind, looking venomous, muttered something and steered Sheila to the door.

  Katharine heaved a sigh. “You lack finesse, Sir Galahad.”

  “One of these days,” said Iredale, “someone’ll break that fellow’s neck.”

  Chapter Four

  Edgar Jessop rarely went to the Crown these days unless some congenial colleague practically dragged him there. For one thing, he knew that alcohol made him boastful and truculent; he was not at his best in his cups. For another, he was always afraid of running into someone he particularly disliked. This evening, in any case, his interview with the Editor had left him in no mood for conviviality. Just before eight o’clock he went up alone to the restaurant, choosing the quietest table and deliberately turning his back on the few people eating there.

  It was his custom, when he had a meal by himself in the evening, to place a folded copy of The Times beside his plate and see how much he could do of the crossword. Usually he found the occupation restful and comforting to his ego, for he had an allusive, well-stocked memory and made good progress. To-night, however, concentration was impossible. He could think of nothing but the injustice and humiliation that he had suffered. He ate mechanically and without appetite, staring down at his plate for minutes at a time, and seeing nothing but his grievances. He felt resentment as a physical sensation—a constriction of the chest and a pounding of the blood.

  He had never been given a decent chance, he told himself—and now, of course, he never would be. It was damnably unfair. No one could have worked harder or more conscientiously than he had to achieve the position to which his talents entitled him. Even as a lad, when other youths of his age had concentrated on having a good time, he had been earnest and diligent and ambitious. He had persuaded old Mr. Lyons, who had been in charge of the office-boys at that time, to arrange his duties so that he could attend night-school. He had learned shorthand and typewriting and French. He had been a regular borrower at the public library. No one could have sought knowledge and self-improvement more assiduously.

  At first he had done well. He had started to climb the ladder, rung by rung, overcoming by sheer doggedness the handicaps of shyness and small stature. From being a mere “boy”—a tearer-off of tapes, a bearer of tea, a universal messenger and anonymous dogsbody—he had through solid worth become in time a skilled telephonist, taking down reporters’ stories. Then the political columnist had picked him out, and he had graduated to the position of personal secretary. Finally, with the help of the columnist’s good-natured patronage, he had made the difficult leap across the chasm that divided the secretarial from the editorial staff, and had become a reporter at the princely wage of nine guineas a week. On the evening of his first pay-day, he remembered, he had taken his widowed mother to dinner at the Trocadero. Looking back now, he thought that that had been the happiest day of his life. As soon as it had become clear that he would be able to hold the job down, they had moved from the mean street in North London, where he had been brought up, to a small semi-detached villa near Beckenham with some trees and a pleasant garden. Life had suddenly become gracious. His interests had quickly widened and exciting new vistas had opened. He had taken his mother to Italy for a holiday in a glow of pride. He had started to write—for her eye alone—verse that had shown a reflective sensitiveness. He had trained his ear to appreciate good music, and had learned to play the piano for their joint pleasure. The world had seemed a good place then. It had a seamy side, but he was young and an idealist, and in his day-dreams it was pleasant to think how he could help to make it better.

  He had proved a competent but not a brilliant reporter. Assignments with a political flavour, interviews with the great, or stories that gave him a chance to write descriptively—these were what he had liked. He had managed to get through the other things too—the fires, the accidents, the suicides and murders and sordid court cases—but not with the tough nonchalance of his colleagues. When an opportunity occurred, he had switched over to the sub-editors’ table—at ten guineas a week—and had applied himself with his customary eagerness to the acquisition of a new skill. He had been a good sub-editor—knowledgeable, careful, and with a flair for the apt headline.

  The war had brought rapid, bewildering changes. For a short time he had been Assistant Features Editor. In a subsequent re-shuffle he had been made Assistant News Editor. Then the bomb in 1941 had made a big hole in the staff as well as in the building, and he had taken over the post of the deceased Assistant Foreign Editor. In that position he had stayed, marking time, for the greater part of a decade.

  Jessop crumbled a piece of bread between his sensitive, fidgety, nicotine-stained fingers and reflected bitterly on the unfulfilled promise of those years. It certainly hadn’t been through any fault of his own that his career had withered. He had continued to do his work efficiently, and with all the versatility required of him. He had been far more reliable, far less addicted to spectacular and costly errors of judgment, than the young men who had since come bouncing in from Oxford or the BBC, throwing their weight about and explaining in loud, cultured voices just what was wrong with the paper. Why, if it had been necessary he could have produced the Morning Call almost single-handed. Yet they had gone ahead, they had become the lieutenants and cronies of the Editor, they had been given the big jobs and the four-figure salaries—and he had remained an assistant. Always an assistant! Always the man who did the real work and never got the kudos. And why? Because he hadn’t the right social background, of course; because he’d educated himself instead of going to a prep school and on to a public school and university; because he’d started work
early in life instead of having everything made easy for him; because he’d never learned how to treat his superiors as equals and get away with it. Because they were all a bloody lot of snobs. When he thought of it, hatred consumed him.

  He ought to have gone to another paper, of course, once it became clear that he had got into a rut. He would have done, too, if it hadn’t been for that insufferable busybody, Munro. A post with the Courier had been almost in the bag when Munro, then a rising Member of Parliament, had chanced to dine with the Courier’s editor. Munro had said something that night—the Fleet Street grapevine had never been precise about just what he had said, but knowing Munro from the old days Jessop could imagine only too well. “Jessop? …”—with a pursing of the lips and a heavy judicial frown. “I’d hardly have thought he was up to it, my dear fellow. A good second-rater, perhaps.” Something like that, anyway—enough to wreck his chances. The odious, interfering swine!

  Anyhow, the opportunity had been missed, and at the Morning Call the drift downhill had started. There hadn’t been any demotion, of course—not even any spoken criticism. It had been much more subtle than that. His prestige and status in the office had declined imperceptibly, and along with it such self-assurance as he had. It had been a gradual slope, with no fatal falls but many shocks to his self-esteem. Little things had marked the change—the occasional hint of impatience in Ede’s tone, for instance, and—more wounding still—the way in which some of his colleagues had ceased to pay attention to his words when he was talking, as though he didn’t matter any more. How many times he had ventured an observation, only to have it drowned by more emphatic voices! They had begun to treat him with a sort of kindly contempt, as a man who was all right, of course, but had just not made the grade. And not all of them had been kindly. Hind, for instance, had often been deliberately brutal in public, humiliating him, inviting the world to snigger at his diffidences and his shortcomings. Editorial conferences with Hind present had become an agonising ordeal. Latterly, the decline had become swifter. There had been official slights, like this failure to invite him to the Munro lunch. Not so long ago he would have been asked automatically in the absence of the Foreign Editor—in those days he had been considered an asset. All this had driven him farther and farther into his shell, had made him more nervous, more gauche, more resentful. A vicious spiral of descent.

  Well, his last hope of a come-back had definitely vanished now, thanks to Ede and Cardew. He’d been passed over finally and for good, after a quarter of a century of devoted service. His abilities, of which he was so desperately aware, were to be allowed to run to waste. He was a middle-aged failure, unappreciated, despised. The years ahead would be hard for his pride to bear. He knew just how barren they would be, for he had watched other men grow old in the office. Brilliant men, some of them, headline names in their heyday, but in the end so apprehensive and dependent, so sapped of fighting spirit, that they would accept the most menial professional jobs with barely a murmur of protest. That would happen to him. And the Edes and the Cardews, the Munros and the Hinds would flourish.

  He could picture them at that lunch to-morrow—the buoyant Ede, the patronising Munro, the debonair Cardew, the gross, coarse Hind. He could see them standing by the window, smiling and joking, sipping their drinks and nibbling their olives and being such good fellows together. He could see them lolling at the table over their brandy, self-confident, socially at ease, buttering each other up—thankful, no doubt, that there was no Jessop there to cause them embarrassment. He hated them all: he hardly knew which of them he hated most.

  He rose dejectedly from his seat, pushed threepence under his plate for the waitress, and walked slowly past the Directors’ Dining Room where he wouldn’t be lunching to-morrow, sunk in self-pity. He went down by the back stairs to avoid meeting anyone and turned into the Foreign Room with relief. It seemed like a sanctuary, with its almost sound-proof walls cutting off the outside world, its solid homely furniture, its familiar threadbare carpet, its companionable tape machine, its ancient maps stabbed with the flag-pins of two wars. Here he could brood in peace. The pleasant aroma of Bill Iredale’s strong tobacco—for this was Iredale’s temporary base in the office—reminded him that he still had one pal in the world. If only Cardew weren’t taking over here to-morrow or the next day!—for after that, the room would seem no longer a refuge, but a prison.

  He dismissed the tape-machine boy with an amiable word or two, for the youth was inoffensive. He glanced through the accumulated pile of copy, but there was nothing to warrant his attention. Indeed, he rarely had much to see to at this time of day, for Oldfield, the Foreign Sub., was kept supplied with tape from another machine and had his own ideas about what to do with the news. Somebody had to sit at the Foreign Desk, that was all—sit there till eleven o’ clock to answer the telephone and be available in case a big foreign story broke. The “somebody”, naturally, was Jessop. He had done the night turn in Lambert’s day and he would no doubt have to go on doing it now. Cardew wouldn’t expect to do it—he preferred entertaining at his club or drinking with the Edes or dining out with foreign diplomats. The night turn was the lot of assistants. Almost all his working life Jessop had been on late shifts, serving the convenience of others. The universal accommodator—Edgar Jessop. That’s how they looked on him. The man who could be pushed around, because there was no more spirit in him. Well, they were wrong. There was still a kick in him yet.

  He reached for his dispatch case and lovingly extracted the magnum opus on which he had been secretly working for many months—the child of his bitter discontent. It was a plan for establishing world standards of Press behaviour under the supervision of the United Nations. He had been interested in world organisation since his youth, and now he had moved into the creative stage. No one, he felt certain, was so uniquely fitted as he to make this contribution. He knew the Press from hard personal experience, he had been through the mill, he had suffered from its abuse of power, its criminal irresponsibility. He had no doubt that his scheme went unerringly to all the roots of all the evils. To its earlier pages; indeed, little exception would have been taken anywhere, for they were sober, factual, and technical. It was only in the later sections that the tone became hysterical and the language violent.

  Jessop himself was unaware of the change. To him the document was a consistent indictment, and he was proud of it. Indeed, now that he was approaching the end, the grand summing-up, he saw no limits to its impact. Ede and Hind and the rest might sneer—would sneer, no doubt, if they knew about it—but what they didn’t realise was that while they were deriding him and passing him over he was quietly undermining the very foundations of their position. When the report was finished, Jessop would send it to the Human Rights Commission of U.N.O., and action would be taken.

  For a long time he sat quietly with the document before him, day-dreaming as he so often did. In his mind’s eye he saw a great concourse of world statesmen, each with a copy of his plan. He heard the applause when his name was mentioned; he listened to speeches acclaiming his vision, sharing his indignation. Sweeter still, he saw himself receiving congratulations from the very people who had scorned him. He dwelt on that. He would be modest, he decided, in his moment of triumph. As far as he was concerned, bygones should be bygones. All the same, he reflected, Ede could hardly help feeling pretty foolish when the text of the document came in over the office tape, with the matter-of-fact catch-line, “Jessop Plan. Full. Not for release before 18.30 G. M.T.” He’d feel even sillier when he found himself personally arraigned in the Plan before the bar of world opinion.

  Jessop would have liked the fantasy to stay bright, but it faded like a rainbow and with a sigh he unscrewed his fountain pen. For more than an hour he wrote with fierce exhausting concentration, filling sheet after sheet of foolscap with his neat careful handwriting. Occasionally as he wrote he smiled to himself at a particularly telling phrase; occasionally he frowned in anger. Sometimes he spoke snatches of sentences aloud
and even declaimed them, waving a hand in the air as though addressing an invisible audience. Once or twice he pushed back his chair and walked agitatedly up and down the room in a fever of composition, his eyes ablaze.

  He was barely aware that the presses had started running until a boy came in with a copy of the first edition. That brutally snapped the thread of thought. He picked up the paper and glanced through the headlines. Afterwards he sat perfectly still, his gaze focused on the middle distance, his eyes unseeing. His attitude suggested sleep.

  He was aroused just before eleven by a distant roll of thunder—forerunner of a storm that had been rumbling around all day. He packed the opus into his case, tore off the last of the tape, locked the door of his room and walked downstairs to the office garage, where he kept his Austin. The commissionaire happened to look up as he crossed the lobby and gave him a nod—an offhand nod, it seemed to Jessop.

  The semi-basement garage was congested, as usual, and he had difficulty in manouvering his car out. It was a ridiculously inadequate garage. Evans, who was in charge of office management, had said only a week ago and with a rather meaning look that he would have to revise the list of people entitled to use it. Jessop felt pretty sure that if any name were knocked off the list it would be his. Particularly now that he wasn’t going to be Foreign Editor. Sycophants like Evans soon got wind of unrealised expectations.

  He drove slowly through the southern suburbs, his mind so absorbed with his troubles that when he reached the road in which he lived he could hardly have recalled a single feature of the route by which he had come. The house which he had shared with his mother until her death a month ago was undistinguished. As a young man he had thought it wonderful, but he had grown out of it and now that she was gone he didn’t quite know what to do about it. He enjoyed solitude more than most men; he even enjoyed looking after himself, provided someone came in once or twice a week to clean. All the same, a whole house to himself was more than he could manage. If he’d had Cardew’s salary, now, no doubt he too could have afforded a luxury flat in Jermyn Street, but he hadn’t, and with the housing shortage so bad everywhere he would have difficulty in finding a place suited to his pocket. And he wouldn’t dare to press his claim for more money at this stage. They might take the opportunity to dispense with him altogether. That would probably please them better even than sending him to Malaya. Malaya! Nothing on earth would induce him to go there.