by Cyril Hare
A.14 was the Research section, and the Research section consisted of Mr. Edelman. He was, in every sense, in a singular position. He had arrived, some time after the rest of the Control, installed himself in an alcove of one of the largest rooms, where the Ministry of Works presently immured him in a plywood compartment of his own, and there he remained, all day and every day, shrouded in fumes of tobacco smoke, an object of mystery to everyone else. He had no secretary and never troubled the harassed maidens of the typing pool with demands on their services. All that was known of his activities was that into his room went a never-ending procession of files, and from it proceeded a no less continuous stream of immense hand-written minutes. The fact that gave Mr. Edelman’s occupation its peculiar prestige was that these minutes, as cross-questioning of the messengers revealed, went direct from A.14 to the Controller himself. What became of them thereafter, nobody knew. They did not, like the minutes of lesser men, percolate down to the Licensing section, the Enforcement branch or the Raw Materials group. Marketing and Export, who between them had their fingers in nearly every pie baked by the Control, knew no more about them than the rest. The current gossip was that they formed part of the staple diet of the Policy Committee at its monthly meetings, and this seemed a plausible suggestion; but since the Policy Committee met in London under the chairmanship of the Minister himself, its agenda were not matters on which the rank and file could speak with any assurance.
The one thing that was obvious about Mr. Edelman was that he was a glutton for work. His hours were long, although he had no superior authority to keep him up to the mark—unless the Controller, in some omniscient fashion, contrived to keep an eye on his activities. Moreover, not content with the daily ration of files which the messengers brought him—again, so it was said, direct from the Controller’s sanctum itself—he had an easy-going habit of wandering through the department from time to time and requisitioning papers impartially from other sections. No worker objected to this practice—everybody had so many files in current use that the disappearance of one from the table was a positive blessing—and there was always the hope that when it returned it might prove to be enriched by one of the legendary Edelman minutes. It was a hope that had never yet been fulfilled. Naturally, the wary ones automatically safeguarded themselves by filling in at least one of the half-dozen forms that the System provided for such contingencies. It was only in the case of Miss Danville, who was in her own way as easy-going as Mr. Edelman, that trouble resulted.
Miss Danville nervously picked her way between the serried tables of the Enforcement branch. Enforcement, for some reason, was exclusively male, just as Licensing was predominantly female. At the far corner of the room was Mr. Edelman’s door. She knocked nervously on it. There was no answer, and after standing uncertainly outside it, horribly conscious of the amused glances of the Enforcement men behind her, she screwed up her courage and went in.
The first thing that she noticed about the cubicle was that it was extremely stuffy. The Ministry of Fuel and Power’s Permitted Date had passed, and consequently the whole house was kept reasonably warm by excellent central heating inherited from Lord Eglwyswrw; but this was evidently not enough for A.14. An electric radiator at full blast filled the tiny apartment with almost unbearable heat. It served to emphasize Mr. Edelman’s lordly attitude to the System and all that it stood for. For even Miss Danville knew that private additions to the official heating installation were forbidden. The stuffiness was accentuated by the smoke from a short, black pipe, clenched firmly between Mr. Edelman’s teeth. Miss Danville coughed.
At the sound, Mr. Edelman raised his head, and peered at her through horn-rimmed glasses.
“Oh it’s you, is it?” he said abstractedly, laying his pipe on the table and scattering ash over the paper on which he was writing. He stared for a moment, as if he had never seen her before, and then, suddenly coming to life, said briskly, “I know—Blenkinsop! I’ve done with him, thank’s very much. Do you want to take him with you?”
“Yes please. And, Mr. Edelman, Miss Clarke says——”
But Mr. Edelman was not paying any attention to what Miss Clarke had to say. He was kneeling behind his desk, burrowing in a mass of files that lay higgledy-piggledy on the floor. Almost immediately he found what he wanted, and rising to his feet pressed an untidy bundle of papers into her hands.
“There you are!” he said genially. “Thanks for the memory. I’m afraid I’ve made rather a mess of him, but he’s all there. Present, if not correct.” His earnest face lit up with a smile at his own wit.
“Oh, Mr. Edelman!” Miss Danville stared in dismay at the eviscerated file in her hands.
This is not the place to describe the Control’s regulations for the arrangement of files. It is enough to say that in them the System reached its apogee. One glance at the corpse of Blenkinsop was enough to establish that here every one of them had been ruthlessly violated.
“I had to pull him about a bit to get what I wanted,” Edelman said airily. “They tie these things up in such a ridiculous way.” Then, seeing Miss Danville’s look of despair, he went on in a kindly tone, “Look here, sit down and put it straight before you go. It’s no good my offering to help you, but you’re welcome to my desk.”
Miss Danville shook her head miserably.
“Miss Clarke wants it at once,” she said. “I’ll have to take it as it is.”
“Oh, so the Clarke is after you, is she? My sympathies. Well, in that case. . . .”
He sat down at his desk again and drew his paper towards him.
“And she asked me to give you this.”
She laid the Registry’s standing order on Transit of Files in front of him. Edelman contemplated it with disgust.
“Oh, this—rubbish!” he exclaimed, evidently substituting the word at the last moment for something a good deal more expressive.
“Why on earth should I have to waste my time——” He stopped abruptly and looked closely at Miss Danville. “I say,” he went on in a different tone, “has the Clarke been making your life a misery over this?”
Miss Danville pursed her lips and said nothing. An odd sense of loyalty to the Licensing section, which she acknowledged to herself to be quite ridiculous, kept her silent.
“I see she has,” Edelman said quietly. He lit a spill of paper at the electric fire and applied it to his pipe. “What a so-and-so that woman is,” he remarked between puffs. “I wonder nobody’s pushed her over the cliffs one of these dark nights. That reminds me—of course you went to bed early last night, and didn’t hear all our discussion—but don’t you think the Clarke would be a very suitable subject for murder? I must get Wood’s views on it. I’m sure you feel like killing her sometimes, don’t you?”
Really, Miss Danville was saying to herself, the heat in here is something dreadful. And the smoke—one can hardly breathe. If I don’t get out of here, I shall faint, I’m sure I shall. But she did not move, and a moment later she realized that she could not move. A strange, yet familiar sensation crept through her—a feeling of divine elation that was at the same time intermingled with deep despair. Time stood still, and she felt as though she had been for untold ages shut in this airless cabin, where the tobacco smoke wreathed like incense, and the desk-lamp gleamed on Edelman’s dark, satanic face, as he spoke words of death. Kill Miss Clarke. Was this then her destiny—this the meaning of the voices that she heard so often and strove so hard to interpret? The Master was speaking, and now his message was plain.
“God almighty! What’s the matter with you?” exclaimed Edelman suddenly. “What are you staring at me like that for?”
The spell was broken. “Get thee behind me Satan!” she cried hoarsely. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!” and she ran from the room.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” murmured Edelman.
He rose, carefully closed the door which she had left open behind her, and plunged into his work again.
Chapter 4
CHIVALRY IN THE CANTEEN
Mr. Wood worked in the Enforcement branch, at the same table as Mr. Phillips, in the corner near A.14’s door. He could not help hearing Miss Danville’s last words, and he looked up as she brushed past him.
“Good Lord!” he said to his neighbour. “Did you notice that?”
Mr. Phillips, who was a slow and conscientious worker, looked up from his papers reluctantly.
“Notice what?” he said. “Oh, Miss Danville—she seemed to be in rather a hurry.”
“You mean you didn’t hear? My dear chap, I was right about that woman. She’s crackers!”
Phillips looked at him with grave concern.
“I trust you are mistaken,” he said. “Mental derangement is a terrible calamity for a woman—terrible.”
“Well, it’s terrible for anybody, man or woman, if you come to that,” Wood replied. “I don’t mean that I’m not sorry for the poor thing, but I suggested last night that I thought she was a bit crazy and now I’m sure of it.” He reached for a scrap of paper and began to scribble notes on it. “The only trouble from my point of view is that it makes the whole thing too easy,” he murmured.
Phillips, who usually resented interruptions to his work, seemed on this occasion quite prepared to pursue the subject.
“Too easy?” he echoed. “Insanity, surely, doesn’t make things easy. It makes them difficult—very difficult indeed.”
“Don’t mean that at all,” grunted Wood between his jottings. “From my point of view, I said. The writer’s point of view. A mad murderer explains everything. Supplies his own motive. Needn’t behave in character. Can kill most improbable people. It’s a piece of cake. I thought I’d explained all that yesterday.”
“Of course, of course,” Phillips agreed. “Only, I didn’t realize at the time—I mean, if Miss Danville is really—er—abnormal, doesn’t it make the whole thing rather—rather dangerous?”
“I don’t see that it does.” Wood carefully folded up his paper and put it away. “She doesn’t know the part we’ve cast her for, you see. No reason why she should. Otherwise, I agree, she might take the game seriously. No, what I was wondering was whether it would be better to have her murder Miss Clarke—that would be a bit too obvious, perhaps—or Edelman. On the whole, though, I see Edelman as a villain. Perhaps he could use her to carry out his own ends—the Svengali motive, you know. He’d enjoy that, I fancy.”
He looked at the clock. “Quarter to one,” he observed. “I’m going down to the canteen before it gets too crowded. Are you coming?”
“Er—not just yet. I think I’ll just finish what I’m on first. Please don’t wait for me.”
“I shan’t.” Wood left him with a grin. It had not escaped his notice that Miss Brown usually came into lunch at a quarter past one, and that Phillips nowadays always happened to be at the entrance to the canteen just in time to meet her there. His grin was without malice. It must, he felt, be an uneasy business trying to conduct an incongruous courtship under the eyes of several hundred people.
Miss Brown, meanwhile, was standing beside Pettigrew’s desk while he read through a long draft which she had just typed from his dictation. Her work, he had discovered, was neat, quick and accurate, and it was seldom that he found very much to correct. Miss Brown, too, was well aware of her own qualities, and her expression was one of meek self-satisfaction as one sheet after another was read, approved and laid aside. She was therefore taken entirely by surprise when Pettigrew, near the end of his perusal, suddenly burst into a shout of uncontrollable laughter.
“Is anything the matter, Mr. Pettigrew?” she asked.
Pettigrew took off his spectacles, wiped them, blew his nose and became himself once more.
“I apologize,” he said. “But this place is so damnably dull that anything out of the way seems irresistibly funny. It’s this bit here—just look at it.”
Miss Brown followed his pointing finger and read: “The decision is hardly compatible with Campkin v. Eager, but that case, it should be remembered, was decided at Nicey Priors.”
“Who do you suppose the Nicey Priors were?” asked Pettigrew, beginning to chuckle again. “They sound an amiable crowd of old gentlemen.”
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Miss Brown, blushing uncomfortably, “but that is what you dictated, Mr. Pettigrew.” She began to turn over the leaves of her shorthand notes.
“No doubt it was. Don’t bother to turn it up. It was my fault for not explaining that I was talking lawyer’s Latin, and with a lawyer’s false quantities at that.” He crossed out the words, wrote in “Nisi Prius”, and murmured, “Poor old Priors! I’m quite sorry to see them go. But they had no business in the Court of Exchequer. Their proper place obviously was the Council of Nicea. Are you well up in the early Christian Fathers, Miss Brown?”
Miss Brown was not, and indicated the fact rather shortly. But Pettigrew, chasing his own fancy, failed to see the danger sign.
“Neither am I, to be honest. I fear they are rather a neglected tribe nowadays. Miss Danville, I daresay, is quite an authority on the subject.”
Miss Brown looked her superior full in the eyes.
“I wish you wouldn’t all make fun of poor Miss Danville,” she said with unwonted firmness. “She is a very, very nice person, and it’s not at all fair.”
She gathered up her papers and retreated, leaving Pettigrew for once in his life utterly at a loss for words.
But it was not what his secretary had said that had caused his confusion, although later he reflected rather bitterly that an elderly man making fun of a young woman’s very natural ignorance cut a somewhat ridiculous figure and deserved any snub he might get. Her real impression on him had been made before she ever opened her mouth. He realized to his great surprise that this was the first time they had ever looked at each other directly. She had a trick of avoiding people’s eyes which he had noted before. Now he was suddenly aware that Miss Brown was the possessor of a pair of large, intensely blue eyes, so vivid and brilliant as entirely to transform her otherwise unremarkable face. The discovery was quite upsetting.
“And I thought she was plain!” he told himself. “Those eyes could be pretty dangerous used the right way.” His nose wrinkled. “Thank heaven,” he mused, “given proper care, there’s no reason why she should ever turn them on to me again, anyway.”
He was perfectly honest with himself, but none the less, when Miss Brown, a few moments later, put her head round the door to announce that she was going to lunch, he felt irrationally disappointed that as usual she looked firmly at his feet.
Pettigrew went into lunch late. By the time he arrived in the canteen it was already emptying. He helped himself to a plate of the stew that was the staple fare at Marsett Bay and found a seat without difficulty. From where he sat he could see the Controller, blond, fattish, and a little bald, lunching tête-à-tête with the head of the Export Department, one of the few other permanent Civil Servants in the Control. In their neat, black suits, and with their serious, aloof expressions, they contrived to bring into their incongruous surroundings an indefinable atmosphere of Whitehall. Further down the room, he noticed two heads close together—Phillips’s iron-grey hair and his secretary’s mousy brown. The sight set him thinking once more of the problem that the evident state of affairs between them was likely to cause, but this time he was less concerned with its effect on himself than the possible consequences to her. He had gleaned something of her circumstances during the time that he had been at Marsett Bay, although she was not communicative and Pettigrew was the last person to wish to pry into the affairs of others. Piecing together what he had gathered, he was surprised to realize how very much alone in the world she was. She had no brothers or sisters, and her mother had apparently died several years before. Since then she had kept house for her father until his death a year or so ago. Obviously she had never made many friends of her own age, and possibly this might explain why she gravitated naturally to the
society of a much older man.
What had the father been like? Pettigrew wondered, as he finished his stew, and turned to the tasteless caramel pudding that followed it. Evidently a man of some education—at least he had given a reasonably good education to his daughter, even if she didn’t recognize “Nisi Prius”. Moreover, although he found it hard to say exactly why, he had the impression that the late Mr. Brown, if not a rich man, had not left his daughter entirely penniless. Miss Brown was certainly not extravagant in her dress or way of life, but Pettigrew felt distinctly that, unlike most of the typists employed by the Control, she had a “background”, and that in that background there was a modest, but assured, income.
Pettigrew frowned a little as he contemplated the picture presented by the couple at the table. On the one side, youth, inexperience, loneliness and a bit of money; on the other side—Phillips. There was something about it that displeased him. Not that he had anything against Phillips—on the contrary, he seemed an amiable, good natured, if rather dull, fellow. It was only in the capacity of a potential husband to Miss Brown that he disapproved of him. It was a feeling that he strove to rationalize, but not altogether to his satisfaction. He ran rapidly over in his mind what he knew of the man. An unadmitted solicitor’s clerk—a snob might say that he was hardly of the same social class as Miss Brown, but that was her affair. From what he had let fall, it was to be gathered that he was a widower, and he was obviously a good twenty-five years her elder. It seemed a drab matrimonial outlook for her, but again that was a matter in which she was entitled to make her own choice. The fact that she spent her working hours in turning Pettigrew’s words into odd-looking symbols on a pad of paper did not give him the right or the power to interfere. Further, Pettigrew told himself firmly, he had no desire to interfere, unless of course it should become a public duty, and there was no prospect of that. All the same. . . . Casting about for some reason to justify the dislike which he felt towards the situation, he wondered for the first time why Phillips had left his employers, at a time when solicitors’ clerks were extremely scarce. He was too old, surely, to have been “directed” into his present job. Was there some unsavoury story behind it? Quite abruptly, Pettigrew found that he was convinced that Phillips was an impostor, who had been dismissed by his employers for dishonesty, who was in fact a married man, and the sort of man that preys on young women with money. A moment later, he was laughing at himself for his melodramatic suspicions. They were, however, vivid enough for him to wish to dispose of them, and then and there he made up his mind to make a discreet inquiry from the firm where Phillips had been formerly employed. It could at least do no harm.