Minute for Murder

by Nicholas Blake

  Nigel rose and bent over Jimmy’s left arm, wrestling with the knot. For a few moments his back was turned to Charles Kennington. Then he sat down again. Charles’s fingers were still round the stem of his glass. He now raised it a little, peering into the apricot-coloured liqueur. He looked up, straight at Jimmy, his eyes blazing feverishly.

  “Well, here’s to the shade of Nita,” he said. “May she rest in peace.”

  There was a queer little pause.

  “Go on, Jimmy,” he said, “you must pledge her too.”

  “Here’s to Nita,” muttered Jimmy Lake, his voice choked and hardly audible.

  The two men drank, Jimmy sipping the liqueur, Charles taking one of his usual gulps.

  The next instant, Charles Kennington was on his feet, his eyes glaring, his hands scrabbling at his throat.

  “God! It burns!” His voice came in a difficult, scraping gasp. Nigel was on his feet too; but, as he started round the table towards Charles, he felt Jimmy Lake’s right hand clamp down on his wrist with extraordinary strength.

  “No, Nigel! It’s better this way. For God’s sake, let him——”

  Charles Kennington swayed on his feet. He retched, and struggled for breath, his face becoming suffused, his eyes fixed wildly on nothing. Then he fell sideways over the chair, twisting like a worm, and slipped away from the chair on to the floor, where he lay face downwards and twitched a little, and then was quite still.

  Jimmy’s hand, still on Nigel’s wrist, now relaxed. He shuddered violently, and sighed—a sound of pure exhaustion.

  “Don’t you see, Nigel?—I couldn’t let you—I had to give him the chance to—it would have been so appalling for Alice, the arrest, the trial, hanging, everything.” He spoke jerkily, pleadingly. “It was my one hope, that he’d have my poison pill on him. I’m sorry I played you that little trick with my sling. I had to give him the chance to put the pill in his liqueur, if he had it, without you seeing.”

  Nigel looked at him steadily. He made no comment, but only asked if he might use the telephone to call a doctor and the police.

  “In the recess there,” said Jimmy, and rising from the table, led the way. The telephone was concealed behind one of the white panels. Jimmy slid the panel aside and pulled the instrument out.

  “What’s the number of your doctor?” asked Nigel.

  Jimmy Lake gave it to him. Nigel had just started to dial it when a voice behind them said:

  “Don’t trouble with the doctor, my dear. Just the police. That’s all we want.”

  Nigel whipped round. Major Kennington was standing behind the table, on the very spot where he had fallen and died.

  A dreadful sound, something like the miniature howl of a man in nightmare, broke from Jimmy Lake’s lips. The sound broke off, as suddenly as it had begun, and Jimmy launched himself towards the door. But Nigel’s hand shot out and caught him by the shoulder, his wounded shoulder, so that he was spun round and sent staggering towards the dinner table.

  Charles put himself at the door.

  “Nigel,” he said, “will you search him. If it isn’t in one of his pockets, it’ll be on the floor, I expect. But the right-hand coat or trousers pocket is my bet.”

  “Stultz’s thing?” said Nigel.

  “Yes. In a manner of speaking.”

  “All right, all right, all right,” muttered the Director, his voice infinitely weary. He was slumped against the edge of the table. His hand went to his right-hand coat pocket. Nigel sprang at him. The end of taking risks had come. He seized the Director’s wrist before his hand was out of his pocket again.

  “All right,” said Jimmy again. “You needn’t be frightened. It’s only this.” And he gently raised his hand and opened it; and on the palm lay a tiny, broken poison container.

  Jimmy’s head moved stupidly from side to side. His face was dazed.

  “I don’t understand,” he muttered, staring at Charles. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a dummy. There was nothing but water in it. Quite wholesome. I’d certainly not have drunk that liqueur you poured it into if I hadn’t known it was pure water. Mirrors have some use, Jimmy. Oh, yes, I saw you break the container into the liqueur glass, when Marmalade created a diversion. I was watching you. In that mirror there. You bet I was watching you.”

  “Ah,” said Nigel to himself. At last that last impossible piece of the jigsaw fitted into place.

  “All right,” said Jimmy Lake. “All right, all right.” After the long duel of wits, after seeing victory and safety assured in his grasp, and then so uncannily whisked out of it, he had no fight left in him at all. He groped for his chair and sat down. His head bowed in his right hand, he said:

  “All right then. I don’t mind. I’d rather. It was the wrong woman I killed, the wrong woman I killed. I’ve realised it ever since, more and more. Oh, Nita, I——”

  He began to weep, drearily and hopelessly. Avoiding Charles Kennington’s eyes, Nigel went back to the telephone.

  CHAPTER XI

  PUT AWAY

  “THE WRONG WOMAN?” asked Blount. “Surely he didn’t poison Nita’s coffee by mistake for his wife’s?”

  “Oh, no. Nita was the intended victim all right. But Jimmy Lake had realised, too late, after he’d killed Nita in order to get back to Alice, that it was Nita, not Alice, he really loved. That’s his tragedy. You know, in spite of everything, I pity him. He was torn in two. And no doubt Nita’s temperament spared him nothing: she gave him hell, as well as heaven.”

  “It was an abominable thing, though, the way he murdered her. If it had been in hot blood——”

  “Oh, yes, I know. Still, I prefer that, of the two, to the cold-blooded way Major Kennington finally trapped him. Jimmy had a warmth about him: he didn’t mind jumping into life off the deep end: Charles and Alice seem meagre spirits by comparison.”

  “Aye, they’re a couple of cold fish all right. But I doubt we’d not have got our man, by your account of it, if Kennington hadn’t bolted him out of his hole.”

  The pair were sitting in Nigel’s room, the night after Jimmy Lake’s arrest. The glass of whisky by Nigel’s side was untouched. He had known for some time that Jimmy’s arrest was the only possible conclusion to the dreadful and confused events of the previous week: yet, now it had come, he felt sick at heart. One ought to have no compunction for a man who had carried out so atrocious a design. And yet . . .

  “I dare say you’re right, Blount. Even then, Jimmy only had to sit tight. I’d absolutely failed to make him budge myself, in spite of the case I worked up against Charles and Alice over the dinner table. I expect he saw all its weakness. But then Charles attacked him. And Charles’s accusations were plumb right all along the line: it was a bit too near the knuckle for Jimmy. He was fairly stung, so he decided to pin it all on Charles and clinch the case by an apparent suicide which would also account for the disappearance of his own poison capsule. It was a wonderfully bold piece of improvisation. And he might have got away with it, if only Stultz’s thing had really been Stultz’s thing. By the way, what is Charles’s explanation of that?”

  “Simple enough. While he was chasing Stultz, he had one or two dummy poison containers made, of identically the same pattern as the Nazis’, but filled with water. His idea was to have these handy in the event of his being able to find one of Stultz’s girl-friends willing to betray him: he’d get her to substitute a dummy container for the poisoned one, so that Stultz wouldn’t be able to commit suicide that way when he was arrested. Charles did, in fact, get at Stultz through a girl-friend in the end; and she did the substitution. We ought to have realised that bit of his letter to Jimmy was just his nonsense.”

  “Yes, you aren’t likely to dislodge a container wedged in a chap’s teeth by slapping him on the back.”

  “So Kennington took the real poison container from the girl, and brought it home with the other dummy one as trophies. It was the dummy one he produced for your party at the Ministry, and the real
one that we found in his luggage.”

  “I should have guessed that, somehow. We both thought it extraordinary that he should have been so careless over a cyanide container. And then there was the expression on his face when Nita died—I ought to have given more value to it—an expression of pure astonishment. A girl dying of cyanide poisoning, and the container disappeared, but there was only water in the container. No wonder he was astonished.”

  “A pity he didn’t tell us about it at once.”

  “I think he was not sure then that it wasn’t Alice who had poisoned Nita’s cup. He knew that Jimmy had possessed a cyanide capsule of his own, and he soon discovered that Alice could have taken it. So he decided to work things out for himself: he didn’t trust us to arrive at the right conclusions about that capsule.”

  “He behaved stupidly there,” said Blount. “After we—after you’d produced your theory about Stultz’s thing, it couldn’t really have been any one but Jimmy Lake who’d done it. He had the strongest motive; he had the means, and the opportunity. It was he who had done the scene-setting—the photographs and cover designs in the room. And then his refusal to go to hospital when he had been attacked by Billson. That gave him away. Why on earth should he fight like that against being taken to hospital if he wasn’t afraid of blabbing out the truth there, in delirium or in his sleep? At home, there’d only be Alice at his bedside—or so he hoped.”

  “She’d probably have trotted straight along to you with the information, the little truth-teller.”

  “Oh, now, Strangeways, you’re a wee bit hard on Mrs. Lake.”

  “I don’t like these cool-as-cucumber girls. Still. You know, Blount, you’d never have got the Public Prosecutor to sanction the case against Jimmy on the evidence you possessed. Much too thin. Just little straws showing which way the wind blew—and counsel for the defence could have blown them out of the window with one puff. All of them. That capital A, for instance.”

  “In the Clough book?”

  “Yes. Jimmy suspected the trap I was laying for him about that. He avoided it, as he avoided several others, by telling very nearly the truth. He admitted Nita had made the J part of it. He said she was teasing him; and in her presence he’d altered the J to an A, teasing back. It made it all seem quite innocent. But, in fact, if it’d been a joke between them, he’d have made a much firmer letter, a bold exaggerated sort of A, wouldn’t he? Whereas the letter was so faint I hardly noticed it at first. Which suggested that Jimmy’s explanation was false. Which implied that he had originally altered the letter in order to divert possible inquiry into his character, his predicament, and therefore his motive. But imagine Crown Counsel trying to make a brick out of that straw!”

  “You’re right there. And those words he spoke after he’d been attacked—‘Alice. She won’t let me go, darling.’ You could interpret them two ways. Either he imagined he was addressing Alice, and referring to Nita, or the other way round. The business of the PHQ file was very strange,” continued Blount, after a ruminative pause. “He did burn it in the stove at his house. It’s queer, because it’s the only attempt he made, till the very end, to draw any red herrings across the trail.”

  “It always did seem odd to me that he should have turned the Ministry upside down looking for that file on the very day Nita was murdered—if he were innocent, I mean. Yet I’m sure he was telling the truth when he said he had no suspicion of the Billson-Fortescue transactions then. My own guess was that he simply wanted something to take his mind off the murder, and this file business was ready to hand.”

  “You’re not far out. I asked him about it this morning. What apparently happened was this: while we were searching his room, he was working in Mr. Fortescue’s. On his way to it, he took the In-tray from the ante-room and brought it along with him. On top of the pile in it was a file he decided to work on at home that evening. He put this in his brief-case straight away: but, in his confused state of mind, he didn’t notice that he’d taken up at the same time the envelope with the PHQ file in it. So this went into his brief-case too. He discovered it there when he got home. In the meantime, that afternoon, he started raising Cain about the file and the prints which Billson had been so slow in supplying. It was just to take his mind off what he’d done. He says that, on returning home, he had a moment of panic. He’d never intended to try to incriminate any one else. But, finding the Secret file in his brief-case, he thought he’d destroy it—simply in order to raise a dust and confuse the issue a bit more.”

  “It sounds so flat and natural, I expect it’s true. But it seems to be the only moment of panic he did have.”

  “Until I started asking about other sources of cyanide.”

  “Yes,” said Nigel. “Why do you suppose he didn’t deny possession of a poison capsule.”

  “That’s simple. First, Harker Fortescue knew that his Director had possessed a capsule. Second, Mrs. Lake was in the room when I asked her husband about it, and her agitation suggested either that she’d used it herself or—”

  “Or that she suspected her husband of having used it?”

  “Well, at any rate, if she had known that the capsule had been destroyed or got rid of somehow, before the murder, she wouldn’t have been upset by our questions about it. Therefore Jimmy Lake dared not pretend he’d destroyed it. And there would certainly be no way for him to prove he had—we’d only have his word for it.”

  “So, as usual, he made no attempt to conceal the truth? That was his policy throughout, after the crime. He is a very clever man, and also something of a moral coward. His brain told him that criminals are often caught out by their own lies; unnecessary lies; particularly murderers. And the moral cowardice, which prevented him breaking cleanly away from Nita, also made him afraid to embark on any positive falsehoods to us. He lay doggo instead: he shammed dead, like a frightened animal: wouldn’t commit himself. Yes, it was all in character. But of course it was a fatal inactivity over the poison pill. The pill wasn’t there in the drawer, and that meant one of two things—he or Alice was the murderer.”

  “No doubt it was the damning fact of that capsule which determined him to come out into the open.”

  “Yes. And his repressed jealousy of Charles. The emotion was mutual, of course.”

  “Jealousy?”

  “I think so. The two of them stood in a queer sort of relationship with Alice. In a way, her twin brother was the great love of her life. I fancy this close relationship with him is really what was behind the failure of her marriage. If you’d seen them last night, Charles and Jimmy, you’d agree with me. The supper party turned into a pretty naked exhibition of mutual antipathy. The jealousy they’d repressed so long boiled over. It was pure jealousy that drove Charles to attack Jimmy so viciously: and I don’t think Jimmy would have tried to make Charles the scapegoat if his instinct for self-preservation hadn’t been directed by jealousy.”

  “You haven’t told me yet exactly what happened at the supper party.”

  “I think Nita herself must have been aware of this jealousy, intuitively,” pursued Nigel. “The way she played up to Charles in Jimmy’s presence when he came to the Ministry that morning. And earlier, when she said ‘Jimmy is practising being hard-hearted. But it doesn’t work’—she was trying to convince herself that what had passed between Jimmy and herself the night before didn’t really mean anything, that Jimmy would never be able to harden his heart against her and give her back to Charles. I’m sure she hoped that the effect of seeing her play up to Charles would be to stir Jimmy’s jealousy and make him realise what he would lose if he threw her away. It was her last throw.”

  “And the supper party?” asked Blount again. “You’re very reluctant to come to that.” His eyes sparkled frostily. “It got a bit out of hand, eh? You lost your grip on it?”

  “You’re damned right I did. It took me out of my depth, and—but I’d better start at the beginning. I’d been up at their house in the morning, as you know, and then Charles came to lunch w
ith me. My plan was to sow the seeds of discord. I was pretty sure then that Jimmy was our man, and that Charles knew—or guessed—a good deal more than he’d told us, and that Alice suspected her husband of the crime. But Charles and Jimmy, for different reasons, seemed determined to sit tight. I had to shift them. With Alice herself I had tried the line that you suspected Charles chiefly. I got a clear impression from her that she had been worrying about her husband, though, more than about Charles: she was definitely on the defensive on his account—and it wasn’t only because Nita’s death had failed to bring them any closer together; or rather, it was clear her suspicion that Jimmy had killed Nita was widening the gulf between them. I suggested this to her, and her reaction absolutely dispersed any lingering possibility in my mind that she might have killed Nita herself. I saw Jimmy immediately after I’d seen Alice. I didn’t get any change out of him at the time. But I did make him uneasy. Both on his own account and Alice’s. I made it clear enough that there was a strong case against him, against Alice, and against Alice and Charles as accomplices. Then I left it to simmer in his mind. He would be compelled to do something, in self-defence or to defend Alice—that was what I hoped: he wouldn’t mind Charles taking the rap for him, but Alice was another matter. Then it was Charles’ turn. The first thing I got from my interview with him was that he’d tumbled to the poison method but was still holding something back.”

  “His knowledge that the container he’d brought to the Ministry was harmless.”

  “Exactly. I mean, I realise that now. At the time, in spite of a broadish hint of his, I didn’t grasp it: he said he’d never thought it was used for the murder; and, when I asked him why, he said ‘Well, for one thing,’ if he’d used it he’d not have bothered to take it out of the room. After a bit, I turned the beam on Alice. Charles then proceeded to give me a long and admirable character-study of his sister, to prove she wasn’t the murdering type, and couldn’t possibly have killed Nita either by herself or in collusion with Charles. But he wouldn’t be drawn further than that. Not at the time. However, the seed was sown. He knew he must act fast and decisively if Jimmy, whom he had suspected almost from the start, was to be caught out. Mind you, I hadn’t yet altogether dismissed the possibility that Charles himself might be the culprit. But then your message came, about finding Stultz’s thing in his suitcase. It completely wrecked my whole build-up of the crime, which depended upon the murderer’s having removed this container after the crime and then presumably either destroyed it or hidden it away. Charles’ reaction to this discovery was very odd indeed. He said, ‘Now you’ve done it’ and tore out of my room. It convinced me Charles was not the murderer: no guilty person could have reacted like that. But unfortunately it seemed to clear Jimmy too. Not immediately, of course: I assumed he’d planted Stultz’s thing in Charles’ suitcase; I thought he’d been driven to act at last. But then you rang up and told me Charles admitted having the key of that suitcase in his pocket all the time, and said it was impossible for any one else to have hidden the container in it.”