The Journeying Boy

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The Journeying Boy Page 6

by Michael Innes


  Inspector Cadover’s feet carried him automatically forward – as automatically as if he had been on his beat nearly forty years before. He was skirting the long queue for the cheaper seats. There was a woman clutching the hand of a fretful five-year-old boy with a chocolate-smeared mouth and sleep-heavy eyes. There were two lovers already beginning to cuddle in the crush. There was an apostate intellectual, furtive and embarrassed, caught by that scanty cincture overhead like a fly on a flypaper. Cadover went grimly forward and the vast building received him. Underfoot the padded carpet was heavy as desert sand.

  Three constables stood in the foyer. They could be no manner of use there; the management had doubtless wangled their presence as a little extra advertisement for its latest, and unforeseen, sensation. Cadover was about to scowl when he remembered that this would dismay them, and that they were only doing what they were told. So he nodded briskly and passed on. A slinky young man had appeared and was proposing to conduct him to the manager. The slinky young man contrived to insinuate that this was a privilege. Cadover, smouldering, marched forward still. Banks of flowers floated past him, gilt and scarlet chairs on which no one had ever sat, little fountains playing beneath changing coloured lights. Hectically tinted photographs as big as tablecloths, each with a disconcerting tilt to its picture-plane, presented curly-headed young men with butterfly ties, sleek-haired not-so-young men with smeared moustaches, a Negro in a straw hat, a nude girl knock-kneed and simpering behind a muff, the members of an entire symphony orchestra dressed like circus clowns… A door was opened and Cadover was aware of bare boards and a good rug, of bare walls and Dürer’s Apollo and Diana. This was the manager’s room. Its conscious superiority to the wares peddled outside was very nasty. Cadover’s gloom increased.

  The manager was sitting at a Chippendale table lightly scattered with objects suggesting administrative cares. On a couch at the far end of the room lay what was evidently a human body, covered with a sheet. By the window stood a glum, uniformed sergeant of police, staring out over London.

  The manager rose. His manner appeared to aim at that of somebody very high up in a bank, and he received Cadover as if he came from among the middle reaches of his more substantial clients. ‘An unpleasant thing, this,’ he said. ‘But if we must show a film of which the highlight is a holocaust what can we honestly say of a mere solitary killing in the Grand Circle? “Irony,” I said to myself at once when they told me about it. “It’s like cheap irony.” And then I had them bring the body straight in here. Now we shall have nothing but standing room for a fortnight. The cinema industry, my dear Inspector, is nothing but a great whore. And you might call this the tart’s supreme achievement to date.’

  The slinky young man giggled deferentially. Cadover, who did not care for this cynical travesty of his own responses, looked round the room. ‘The tart,’ he said, ‘would appear to treat her doorkeepers handsomely enough.’ There was a brief silence. The slinky young man giggled on another and an abruptly checked note. Cadover walked over to the body and twitched away the sheet. ‘Unknown?’ he asked.

  The sergeant had come up beside him. ‘No identification yet, sir. It’s been made deliberately difficult.’

  ‘This happened in the auditorium?’ Cadover turned to the manager. ‘And you had the body hauled out on your own responsibility?’

  ‘Certainly. There was nothing else to do. And it wasn’t known that the fellow was dead until they had him out in the upper foyer.’ The manager returned to his desk and consulted a note. ‘Lights went up at the end of Plutonium Blonde, the time being three minutes past four. One of the girls we call usherettes’ – and the manager made a fastidious face over this barbarism – ‘saw the fellow slumped in his seat and went up to have a look at him. He didn’t look right, so she called the floor manager. That was the regular procedure. The floor manager gave him a shake, and then saw the blood. By that time there was a bit of a fuss round about, so he sent one of the girls for a couple of commissionaires and to call up a doctor. He supposed, you know, that the fellow had suffered a haemorrhage, or something like that. By this time the lights were due to go down, and he didn’t stop them, since he didn’t want more disturbance than need be. But as the body was lifted out he saw that it was a body – that the fellow was dead – and he tells me that the notion of foul play did enter his mind. He called two firemen to stand by where the thing had happened – fortunately it was right in the back row – and then he came straight up to me. I gave instructions for the body to be brought in here and for the police to be called up at once. Then I went in to see how it was with the seats where the thing had happened. The row immediately in front was full. But the dead man’s seat was, of course, still empty, and so was one seat on his right and three on his left. So I ordered the whole five to be roped off and guarded. Then your men arrived and my responsibility ended. Lights go up again in five minutes. Of course, if you want the theatre cleared and closed, I will have it done. Only you might put me through to your Assistant Commissioner first. I have to consider my directors, you know.’

  Cadover made no reply. He turned to the sergeant. ‘Well?’

  ‘We arrived while they were still showing the short that follows Plutonium Blonde. There seemed no point in sealing the place. People had been pouring out and in during the previous interval – the one during which the discovery of the body was made. But, of course, there was the question of people nearby when the thing occurred who might still be in the theatre. There was that, and there was what the usherettes might know, and there was clearing a space round the spot where the thing had happened, and searching it in the interval after the short. Inspector Morton is on that now, sir, with half a dozen men from the district. But I understand they’ve come on nothing yet. The crime appears to have passed unnoticed.’

  ‘Unnoticed? But this man was shot. You can’t shoot a man in a public place without–’

  The remainder of Cadover’s sentence was drowned in a sudden crashing explosion which made Dürer’s engraving rattle on the wall. The manager sighed resignedly. ‘Disgraceful,’ he murmured. ‘Do you know that between the auditorium and this room there are two supposedly soundproof walls? We shall have people calling quacks from Harley Street to swear that they’ve been deafened, and we shall have to pay thousands of pounds. And, of course, it’s indecent too. Much more indecent than rows of ghastly little trollops waggling their photogenic haunches. The Lord Chamberlain should intervene. When I was a young man I had idealism, Inspector, I assure you. I saw Film as a great new aesthetic form. Those were the days of the early Clairs, and of Potemkin and Storm over Asia. And to think that it should all come to this…! Would you care for a cigar?’

  The slinky young man, looking awed, produced a box of Coronas from a drawer. Cadover petrified him with a scowl. ‘Was that meant to be an exploding bomb?’ he asked.

  The manager nodded. ‘An atomic one. The biggest noise in the entire noisesome history of the screen. Sound’s greatest triumph. The explosion kills seventy-five thousand supers hired at five dollars a head. It also blows the clothes off a gaggle of girls in a cabaret. It’s all very disheartening to people like ourselves. To say nothing of being an invitation to murder. For plainly the shot was fired just as the sound-track triumphantly broke the record. Ingenious, come to think of it. The poor fellow must have been lured in expressly to be shot under cover of that hideous row. And then he was robbed.’

  ‘Robbed?’ Cadover turned sharply on the sergeant.

  ‘I don’t think it should be called that, sir. Everything – or nearly everything – was certainly lifted from the body. But there was more to it than that. Bits of the clothing were cut away.’

  ‘Bits of the clothing.’

  ‘Yes, sir. You know there are three places where a good tailor usually sews in a tab with a name – an inner jacket pocket, a waistcoat pocket, and the inside of the trouser-tops at the back. Well, all these places have been cut out.’

  There was a silence while C
adover verified this. ‘I can understand the shooting,’ he said. ‘With a smokeless powder, and when the audience was stunned and distracted by that uproar, the thing would be possible enough. But that anyone should then be able to tumble the body about–’

  The slinky young man giggled. ‘It was in the back row, Inspector, and you must remember how people do behave in a cinema – and particularly there. Lovers embrace and fondle each other in the darkness–’

  ‘That’s deplorably true.’ The manager had assumed an expression of refined repugnance. ‘With a little care, this bold rifling of the body could be made to bear the appearance of mere amorous dalliance. What a splendid point for the Sunday papers that will be.’

  Cadover frowned. ‘Initials? Laundry marks?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant nodded. ‘Several of the undergarments have the initials P C.’

  Once more the slinky young man giggled. ‘I don’t suppose that they could stand for Police Constable, could they?’

  The manager looked offended. ‘Really, Louis, this is no occasion for unfeeling jokes. A hard-boiled attitude is quite out of place.’ The manager lit a cigarette, strolled across the room, and glanced indifferently down at the body. ‘About thirty, would you say? And a military type. Nothing like the Army for wiping off an individuality a face may once have been blessed with. You could pick half a dozen almost identical young officers out of any line regiment.’

  This was true. For that sort of identification which is sometimes achieved with the aid of smudgy photographs exhibited outside police-stations or in the Press there could scarcely, Cadover reflected, be a less promising subject. Not that it ought to come to that. Perhaps, within a few hours, and almost certainly within a few days, there would be a link-up with one of the endless inquiries after missing persons that flow in upon the Metropolitan Police. A body not ultimately thus identified would be a rarity indeed… He turned to the sergeant. ‘Everything been done here?’

  ‘Yes, sir. And Inspector Morton is in a room just opposite.’

  ‘I’ll see him now. Have the body removed.’ Cadover nodded curtly to the manager and walked out. The foyer was crowded. Plutonium Blonde was over. The evening’s final showing of the programme was about to begin.

  Inspector Morton was interviewing a succession of girls dressed in bell-bottomed white trousers and enormous scarlet bows. Two constables were making shorthand notes and another was recording the proceedings on a dictaphone. The room was a humbler version of that occupied by the manager, and there was another Dürer engraving on the wall. Perhaps it belonged to the slinky young man called Louis.

  ‘All we found.’ Inspector Morton had interrupted himself to jerk a thumb at a table behind him. Cadover crossed to it and saw a bunch of keys, a pile of loose change, and a pocket diary.

  ‘Finger-prints?’

  ‘Been attended to. The diary was in the hip-pocket and must have been missed when the body was rifled. It has a few interesting scribbles.’ Morton turned back to the girl before him.

  Cadover picked up the diary. It was new and at a first glance appeared entirely unused. He turned to the page for that day. Scrawled in pencil he read:

  gun for boy 1.15.

  He turned to the preceding page and found:

  N I police re guns etc.

  Light railway from Dundrane

  Two days earlier he found:

  Bolderwood

  Hump

  He continued to search. Throughout the diary there was only one other entry. It occurred six days before and read:

  Smith’s 7.30

  Cadover put down the diary, picked up the bunch of keys, and examined them carefully one by one. Then he did the same with the little pile of silver and copper coins. One florin he inspected for some time. Then he turned round. A pair of sailor’s trousers – very tight above and baggy below – was swaying from the room, and Inspector Morton was staring at this departure in unflattering absence of mind. ‘Cadover,’ he said, ‘do you think it might be terrorists?’

  ‘No.’

  Morton sighed. ‘It was easy to do, and the setting will give it sensational value. But no doubt you’re right. Some of these girls are far from being fools. A lot behind, but something on top as well.’ Morton paused and, getting no response to this, sighed again. ‘To begin with, something emerges from the box-office. They have been showing to full houses, but when the lights went up and the body was noticed there was one empty seat on its left and three on its right. Four people had left before the end of Plutonium Blonde – before the end, that is to say, of its first showing of the day. So there was no question of those people leaving when the film reached the point at which they had come in. Moreover, for that showing those seats could be booked – and they had been booked. So I thought at once of quite a little gang on the job. They had their victim nicely isolated, and after killing him they all cleared out. But there is a point that is pretty conclusively against that.’

  ‘The booking?’

  ‘Exactly. When you book, the girl in the box-office hands you the numbered tickets and makes a blue cross on the correspondingly numbered seats on a plan. And here we come upon the blessings of industrial psychology. How to make blue-pencil crosses on a plan with most speed and least fatigue. Pushing up production per man-hour – or girl-hour, in this case.’

  ‘Ah.’ Cadover’s expression indicated no appreciation of this embroidery.

  ‘Two seats is zig-zag, zig-zag. Three seats is zig-zag-zig, zig-zag-zig. In other words, you can study the line of crosses and distinguish the number of seats booked at a time. Of the five seats in question, three were booked at one go, and two at another. There can have been no concerted booking of all five.’

  ‘Does that follow? The bookings may have been successive. One fellow comes immediately behind the other and simply says he’ll have the next three.’

  Morton shook his head. ‘In this case, I think not. The block of three has been crossed off with a much more recently sharpened pencil than the block of two. And if one wanted to make sure of all five seats one would scarcely–’

  ‘Quite. But does the girl in the box-office remember anything about the people concerned?’

  ‘Definitely not. It couldn’t be expected. The job is purely mechanical and she must have lost all interest in the faces peering in on her long ago. But it’s a different matter when we come upstairs to the usherettes. We get far more than we might hope for from them… Look here, I’ll draw a plan. It will explain the situation until you can see for yourself.’ And Morton reached for a pencil. ‘The seats in question we’ll call ABCDE, and you can see that A comes next to a gangway. It’s the back row, remember, so there’s nobody behind. From the people in front and to the right we may get something, though I doubt it now. The body was in B. And it was ABC that were booked together in a block of three, and DE that were booked together in a block of two… I think we may say that something of a picture begins to emerge.’ And Morton tapped his pencil with some complacency on the table before him.

  Cadover grunted. ‘What about those usherettes?’

  ‘Ah! Well, there’s a girl who remembers showing the dead man to his seat. But he didn’t bring three tickets; he brought two. And there was already someone – a woman – in A. Nobody remembers the woman arriving. She may just have had her counterfoil taken at the entrance and found her way to her seat herself. You can see it was an easy one to find. But her ticket, mind you, had been bought along with B and C.’

  Cadover committed himself to his first judgement. ‘Good,’ he said.

  ‘And this girl remembers who came with the dead man. It was a boy. He might have been about fifteen. Now, of course, that’s pretty queer. It suggests that the crime was perpetrated by a woman and a lad. Not but what the woman’s function isn’t clear.’

  ‘It is at least conjecturable.’

  Morton nodded. ‘Put it that way, if you like. The dead man believed that on his left there was a stranger having no interest in him. Actu
ally, the woman may have been his murderer. And certainly she had her part to play as soon as he was dead. Everything that might serve to identify the body–’

  ‘Quite so. The manager here has tumbled to that. The job was done under the appearance of hugging and being hugged.’ Cadover stared sombrely at Morton’s plan. ‘And then this woman, and the boy who had lured the victim to his fate, slipped out. Did anyone remark that?’

  ‘No. We have nothing but the arrival of the man and boy. By the way, though, it was something about the boy that had struck the usherette’s attention. He wore a bowler hat.’

  ‘Is there anything so remarkable in that? You and I both wear bowler hats.’

  Morton chuckled. ‘That’s because we are both a particular sort of policeman. Mere lads don’t often wear them nowadays. Possibly some conservatively inclined office-boys in the city still do, but on the whole it’s a habit confined to a few public schools which like their boys to dress like that when in Town. That’s what attracted the notice of this usherette – the glamour attaching to our fading institutions of privilege.’ Morton lingered over this phrase with evident pride. ‘And she says that he didn’t look quite right. She says that that’s why she noticed him. Bowler hat and all, he didn’t look quite right… But one would expect her to say that now.’

  ‘Of course one would – but then might she not be correct?’ Cadover smiled a rare smile. ‘Public schoolboys with lethal intentions are quite wrong.’ His expression grew dark again. ‘Commonly they have to wait till they grow up and we turn them into airmen and soldiers.’

 

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