Plain Murder

by C. S. Forester

  ‘Oldroyd,’ he said pleasantly, ‘the policeman wants to ask you a few questions as well.’

  Oldroyd rose from his desk and turned towards him a face full of consternation; luckily his back was to the light.

  ‘It’s a good thing,’ went on Morris, still speaking pleasantly, with his nerves keyed up to their highest pitch, ‘it’s a good thing we were all together last night and can prove an alibi. I had to account for all my actions up to eight o’clock last night, and I suppose you’ll have to as well. Go on in, sonny, and say that you couldn’t have been up to any mischief, because you had your uncle Morris with you all the time.’

  No one would ever have suspected Morris of being tactful, but the instant pressing danger brought out all the best in him. The gentle warning was conveyed without any suspicion arising in the minds of Clarence and the others. Oldroyd was steadied for the coming interview without any undue delay. He passed on to Mr Campbell’s room: Morris fell wearily into his chair. This business was more exhausting than he had expected; but – it was this which was the most solid support to his waning strength – it had to be gone through. There was no backing out of a murder once the murder was committed. With death behind and life in front one could be sure of struggling on while it was possible still to struggle. He looked up and saw Reddy’s white face turned towards him. Instantly he braced himself again. The man to whom the sight of panic among his subordinates is not merely not infectious, but is instead a steadying influence, is an ideal leader. Morris displayed ideal leadership when he forced himself to smile confidently across to Reddy. He reassured the wretched boy by his carefree demeanour.

  Reddy, tortured with fear and remorse, did not know whether to admire or to hate the dark-haired villain who smiled at him so blandly. But it was wonderfully comforting, all the same, to see him sitting there looking as though he had not a trouble in the world. Reddy had at last achieved a sense of reality. It had not seemed possible to him that Mr Harrison would be killed, but now that had really happened he was able to realize that other unthinkable, horrible things could happen too: that John Reddy, for instance, could be hanged. Without Morris’s continual reassurance the prospect drove him to blind panic. With it, it steadied him extraordinarily.

  Oldroyd came back into the room; all eyes turned towards him.

  ‘That’s that,’ he said, elaborately casual. The passing of the danger had gone to his head like liquor. ‘What did you do last night? I? I was with my good friends Mr Morris and Mr Reddy. Blast his eyes! Does he think we did it?’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t,’ cut in Morris abruptly. ‘He’s only got to ask these dam’ fool questions out of routine. You could see that by the way he asks them.’

  ‘That’s so,’ said Oldroyd solemnly. ‘You are right, Mr Morris. Always right, as usual, Mr Morris.’

  ‘Well, get on with those ads, now, anyway. This bally business is holding us up like billy-ho. What d’you think Mac’ll say if we have to put a “reserved” ad. in the Glasgow Advertiser?’

  A space in a newspaper bearing the large type announcement to the effect that: ‘This space is reserved for So-and-So’s Potted Meat Company’, indicates that the company’s advertising agents have sent in their advertisement too late for publication, and it is in consequence the most damning evidence of slackness in that office.

  ‘Oh, God, listen to that!’ went on Morris as the buzzer sounded again. ‘I suppose they want someone else now.’

  He was right. Mr Campbell and the police officer now demanded Reddy’s presence.

  ‘Reddy,’ said Morris, standing in the doorway, ‘Mac wants to see you.’

  Reddy came over to him; he felt like a man going to death. Morris shut the door behind them.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, low voiced. ‘He isn’t fierce. He hasn’t got any suspicions. Really he hasn’t. Just remember. You went home for your motor-bike, came along to Oldroyd’s, met me outside, went in and talked and then went to the pictures. That’s all.’

  He patted Reddy on the shoulder, and somehow Reddy was supremely grateful for the contact. It made him feel much less isolated in the world. He went in feeling bolder than ever before, with Morris’s last words fixed in his mind.

  Morris was right. The police officer had no suspicions. He devoted only a cursory inspection and a few questions to this obviously harmless boy, and Reddy’s embarrassment and confusion were put down to a not unnatural shyness. Mr Campbell had already given the police officer the best possible character for Reddy. And of all the people in the office Reddy, it appeared, had the smallest conceivable motive for the crime. Reddy never had a clear recollection of the interview, but it must have gone off well enough. Morris experienced immense relief when Reddy came back into the room and was able to smile weakly in response to the eager looks directed at him. Until Clarence came back from his interview, too, and changed the subject, he answered quite intelligently the questions which were asked of him. Clearly he had survived the ordeal in the next room, and now there was nothing in his manner to rouse suspicion in the unthinking minds of Shepherd and of the elegant young traveller who was still lounging round the room.

  This last young man felt himself a little aggrieved that Mr Harrison had got himself killed. He voiced his grievance to Morris.

  ‘I suppose my work isn’t important,’ he said with devastating irony. ‘You can turn to and work at those measly little ads., but you can’t spare a minute to get out those examples we were talking about last night. Now that Mr Harrison’s gone no one here knows what is important and what isn’t.’

  Morris put down his pen and stared at him. It took a moment or two for him to realize just what this fellow was talking about. Then he remembered, and he allowed the pent-up irritation within him free vent.

  ‘Are you talking about those ads. for Nebuchadnezzar Cars?’ he demanded. ‘Do you really think, you poor idiot, that this office is going to waste a couple of days or so getting out sample ads. because you’ve got an idea you’d like to get their advertising? Talk sense. Why, even if you weren’t the bloke approaching them, we’ve got no more chance of getting it than – than we have of getting hell’s advertising when hell sets up as a winter resort. You haven’t got an idea in your head beyond motor-cars, just because your daddy lets you drive his out once a week. God lumme, this office doesn’t run on half-million appropriations! Go and look through the papers and find the folk with two hundred a year to spend on advertising. Get them to give us the job, and we’ll be grateful. Ten two hundred are a dam’ sight better than one two thousand, an’ the hell of a lot safer. Go out and get them – you haven’t brought fresh work into this office for a couple of months or more. I’m sick of the sight of you. Hop it and give me a rest!’

  The wretched youth had begun to wilt before the heat of this condemnation before Morris was half finished speaking; at the end of the speech he was reduced to utter feebleness, standing with his jaw dropped, wincing under the shrewd blows Morris dealt out to him. He might have replied had time been given to him, but any chance of that was obviated by the sound of Mr Campbell’s buzzer once more. Morris heaved himself up and went to see what it was this time.

  Mr Campbell was seated at his desk with his rimless spectacles on and a kindly look in his short-sighted eyes.

  ‘Ah, Morris,’ he said. ‘Sorry to bother you again when you’ve had such a disturbed morning.’

  Morris made the inarticulate noise appropriate to a reply to an employer’s apology.

  ‘It’s like this,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘After this very unfortunate business I must find someone to take Mr Harrison’s place. He will have complete charge of the composing room – horrid word that, I always think. We’re not compositors.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Morris, his heart beating more violently than when he had shot Mr Harrison.

  ‘You are the senior in there now,’ went on Mr Campbell. ‘I should at first have considered you
too young for the position, although I like your work. But then I have just heard you telling young Lewis about the basis of this particular business. No, don’t be surprised, because you know by now that I can hear most of what goes on in there. It’s part of my job as your employer. Well, I liked what you had to say. And it would be a nuisance bringing in a new man to a job like that. Do you think you could take over Mr Harrison’s position?’

  ‘I think so, sir,’ said Morris.

  ‘Well, you can go back in there and tell them that you have it. You’re getting four ten a week now, I think?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I paid Harrison eight. All the same, I won’t give you that for a long time. But I’ll make it five ten, starting from last Monday.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  And with that Morris withdrew. It was the reward of success, the reward of a good plan well laid and well executed; a pound a week rise and promotion; money and power at once. Murder was both safer and more profitable than the receiving of bribes. Morris may possibly have had a twinge or two of conscience up to this time – it is hard to say whether he had or not – but from now on for certain he had none at all.

  ‘Well, you blokes,’ said Morris, back in the composing room, ‘I’ve got Harrison’s job. Sorry and all that, but that’s how it is.’

  The others looked at him. Reddy looked uncomprehending; Shepherd looked a little envious; Clarence cared nothing one way or the other; Lewis looked utterly disconcerted; and Oldroyd was consumed with a fierce annoyance. This fellow had killed a man and had not merely got off scot free so far, but he had been given the best job in the office – the only one, too, to which Oldroyd could aspire. Not merely that, but he had tied Oldroyd’s hands so that the latter could not stir a finger against him. Oldroyd’s slow north-country blood fairly boiled, not with righteous indignation, but with fury at being outwitted. It was worse still that he now would have to dissemble his fury, would have to kow-tow to his late accomplice, who was now lord of the composing room. Oldroyd pictured himself treating Morris with the deference with which he had previously treated Harrison, and he raged impotently at the thought.

  Morris scanned their faces one at a time. He was superbly self-confident. There is nothing like a resounding success behind one to give one a good conceit of oneself.

  ‘All right,’ said Morris, ‘let’s get on with it. I want to see those roughs in half an hour’s time, Clarence. Shepherd, get me the files of our ads. in the Irish Times. And have you got anything particular to do in here, Lewis?’

  Lewis confessed that he had not, now that (so he began to continue) Morris had with vile prejudice decided against his pet plan.

  ‘Right,’ said Morris, cutting him short. ‘Then this isn’t the place for you. Your sphere of influence is the Great Outdoors. Go and find some business for us.’

  Lewis went; and as he went Shepherd found the files Morris had asked for. He began to put them on Morris’s table, but Morris checked him.

  ‘I’ll have them up here,’ he said, and he indicated the late Mr Harrison’s table, on the dais. It was an appropriate gesture.

  To Morris there seemed nothing nightmarish, nothing unpleasant about the situation. Life was golden and hopeful. Both Reddy and Oldroyd felt the horror of sitting down to work with a murderer at their backs and in authority over them.

  7

  Mr Campbell thoroughly approved of the progress of his new deputy at the office. Harrison, Mr Campbell felt, had been too easy-going to keep his subordinates up to the mark, although that was just what Mr Campbell, an easy-going man himself, had paid him for. With Morris it was a different story. His new authority was intensely agreeable to him in his new successful mood. Promotion may have gone a little to his head, but years of service under Mr Harrison had most certainly taught him the weaknesses of Harrison’s system – the chances it offered to his subordinates to waste time; the slack periods and the uneconomical rush times which it brought about; above all, he had been irritated times without number by Mr Harrison’s constitutional inability to say no.

  There was to be no more of that under Charlie Morris’s regime. Messrs Reddy and Oldroyd and the new importation, Mr Howlett, were not allowed now to idle long hours away pretending to work. The office was, of course, full of the most fascinating newspapers and weekly periodicals, sent by publishers as voucher copies when the Universal Advertising Agency had bought space in them, and it was a huge temptation to read these things under the pretence of studying advertisements. Mr Morris arranged to put temptation out of the others’ way by having all these piled up under his own eye. Slack times were to be filled in with starting new work, perhaps even as much as a week before it was wanted. And the suggestions which poured in upon him were decided upon instantly. Ninety times out of a hundred Mr Morris would say at once ‘No good,’ having heard the suggestion through. Nine times out of a hundred he would say, ‘M’m. Might be something in it. Think it out better and bring it to me next week again.’ Only once in a hundred times would he say, ‘That seems all right. Let’s have another look.’ But when he said that a new advertisement was well on the way to being completed; and once the office had roughed it out it was extremely rare for Mr Campbell to veto it, while the client himself was usually as pleased as ever a client is with an agency’s work – for what that recommendation is worth. Things were very different from under the sway of Mr Harrison, who would hum and haw for half a day over a new notion and invariably submitted to Mr Campbell twice as many suggestions as eventually found their way into the Press.

  The new methods, however, did not endear Morris to the others. Shepherd, the ambitious office boy, simply hated Morris, for not only did Morris turn away with contempt from every one of his treasured suggestions (in an advertising office every member of the staff teems with artless ideas for the design of new advertisements), but also Morris knew to a minute how long it took to go from the office to all the places Shepherd had to go to, and Shepherd now found himself deprived of his long minutes of exquisite idling in the London streets. Clarence found that Morris’s demands imposed a serious strain upon his artistic temperament. He did not like the way in which Morris expected work which could be done in an hour ready in an hour’s time; still less did he like the offhand manner in which Morris condemned impressionist drawings and insisted on photographic realism. As for Lewis, the traveller, there were no bounds to his loathing for Morris, who persisted every day in demanding from him publicly an account of how he had spent his time, and who judged achievements not by the measure of dreams dreamed but by that of cold, hard figures of business brought in. Lewis, whose influential father was an old friend of Mr Campbell’s, and whose mother was a distant relation, had no particular fear of losing his job. All the same, Morris’s scathing public comments so pierced his sensitive skin that, unwilling, he actually began to work for his salary, and the more he worked the more his dislike of his tormentor increased.

  Oldroyd felt the change worse still. He had been an old familiar of Morris, and would have been disconcerted by his promotion even if there had been no unusual event preceding it. It is hard to have to defer to a man with whom one has often spent long evenings chatting about every subject under the sun, and whose coffee one has often paid for, and who only last week was ‘borrowing’ cigarettes. Oldroyd would have been annoyed by Morris’s cracking of the whip even solely on this account. But seeing that in addition Oldroyd knew that Morris was not above petty thievery it was more annoying still. Then there was Oldroyd’s anger with Morris having lured him into legal complicity in his crime. The crime itself, after a day or two, did not prey so much on Oldroyd’s mind. Try as he would, he could think no worse of Morris because the latter had killed a man. He could not regard him with awe or fear or disgust on that account. Yet it was highly irritating to Oldroyd to have Morris at his mercy on account of his knowledge and yet to be quite unable to make use of that knowledge, particularly when Mor
ris was taking advantage of that fact to drive Oldroyd into an efficiency of work which was as tiresome as it was novel.

  It was Reddy on whom the new state of affairs had the profoundest effect. Reddy, who always needed to admire someone, had alternated for some days between admiring Morris and hating him. At last he had come to hate him, and to fear him; Oldroyd’s influence probably told in this respect. The Satanic cunning which Morris had displayed had first brought its feeling of distrust, and then had ruined all the boyish affection which Reddy had felt towards Morris on account of the latter’s flamboyant personality. Reddy’s feelings had changed very considerably. Once he had admired Morris’s coarse good looks; now he was aware that they were coarse. Once he had thought Morris a man of determination; now he thought him merely unscrupulous. Once he had believed him to be a good fellow; now he knew him to be one who traded on that belief. The black crime on Morris’s soul meant much to Reddy; Reddy would look at Morris’s thick hands with disgusted fascination as the hands which had killed a man. Reddy was not at all in the state of mind which could produce good work, exact work, and original work, such as Morris was determined to exact from him.

  And besides all this there was fear eating at the hearts of the two young men. Morris did not experience it. The interview with the police had gone off well. A puzzled coroner’s jury, after two adjournments, had brought in the inevitable verdict of murder against persons unknown. Not an atom of evidence had been forthcoming. None of the pryings of the police had discovered anyone who might have desired Harrison’s death, or who could have been near the scene of the murder when it was committed, not even though as a last resort they had interviewed Oldroyd’s landlady, and had received her vague but reliable assurance that Oldroyd had not left the house before eight o’clock, and that he was certainly entertaining Morris and Reddy up to that time. Even had the chances of detection been much greater Morris would not have been afraid now – he was not that kind of criminal – but Reddy and Oldroyd were of different stuff. Oldroyd had been sick with fear ever since his landlady had told him of the visit of the police. At any moment he expected to feel the hand of arrest on his shoulder. His native stolidity enabled him to bear the strain without breaking down, but he felt it all the same.