Is Skin Deep, Is Fatal

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘It’s certainly no day for leaving the window wide open, even if you were not such a creature of comfort as this creature was,’ Ironside said.

  He glanced briefly at the mortal remains of the late Mr Pariss.

  ‘And then there’s the desk drawers, sir,’ Peter went on more confidently. ‘I mean, the way they’re all forced open like that. It can only mean one thing.’

  ‘Only one?’

  ‘Well, sir, surely it must mean someone came in and raided the place.’

  Ironside nodded gravely.

  ‘Open drawers,’ he said. ‘Some papers on the floor there behind the desk, too. It certainly looks like breaking and entering.’

  ‘Can it really be anything else, sir?’ Jack asked, growing cunning.

  ‘Do you think it can, Spratt?’

  ‘Well, I don’t, sir, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘Then you’d better have a closer look at that window. You know the sort of thing to keep an eye out for, I dare say.’

  ‘I think so, sir. Signs of forcing, any clues to the type of instrument used, footmarks on the wall below, and keep well clear until the boys have checked for dabs.’

  ‘I see all those lectures at the training school left their mark.’

  Jack did not reply. Instead he went and began examining the window. Ironside stood looking down in a melancholy way at the rifled drawers of the little desk.

  ‘Tell me, Spratt,’ he said after a few moments, ‘how high up in the outside wall is that window?’

  ‘About five feet to the sill, sir,’ Jack said.

  ‘It must be the same as the ones next door,’ said Peter. ‘I looked out of them when I was checking to see if the safe in there was being done.’

  ‘Yup,’ said Jack. ‘This window comes right next to one of those.’

  He drew his head back in.

  ‘Looks as if the catch was pushed back, sir,’ he said. ‘The gap between the two frames is quite wide enough.’

  ‘Any physical clues on the catch itself?’ Ironside asked. ‘You’ll find a magnifying glass in the murder bag if you want it.’

  Jack hurried over, unable to resist the chance of opening the fabled bag.

  ‘Now what about this other window over here?’ Superintendent Ironside said.

  Peter looked up at the other window in the room. He had hardly noticed it before. It was high up in the corner and only about a foot square.

  ‘Doesn’t look as if anyone could have got in there, sir,’ he said.

  ‘No?’ Ironside said.

  ‘They could do, sir,’ said Jack. ‘If your head with one arm beside it will go through, the rest of you will.’

  He stood for an instant with his right arm held up alongside his right cheek.

  ‘Very good,’ Ironside said. ‘All those lectures, and not one of them going to waste.’

  He strolled over and looked up at the little window.

  Peter glared at Jack. Jack grinned widely.

  ‘What’s on the other side of this, then?’ Ironside asked.

  ‘Think there’s a yard of sorts outside there, sir,’ said Peter.

  ‘Shall we go and look?’ Ironside said. ‘If we were certain it would greatly relieve my mind.’

  Peter followed him out of the little office and through the double doors just beside it. As he had thought, there was a yard on the far side of the little window. And the window itself was covered with a matted layer of spiders’ webs.

  ‘Well, that’s out,’ he said.

  Ironside glanced round the long, narrow yard bordered on one side by a tall wall topped by a vicious growth of jagged-edged bottles and on the other side by the towering blank side of the Star Bowl itself. At ground level there were a few windows, their grey dirtiness streaked here and there where the raindrops had dribbled down them.

  The superintendent indicated them with a long, disdainful forefinger.

  ‘What rooms do they belong to?’ he asked.

  Peter grimaced in concentration as he worked it out. In a moment he came up with the answer.

  ‘The first pair are the dressing-rooms,’ he said. ‘Those are the ones you can just make out a bit of lace curtaining across. And next is the rest room. That sort of glint is the copper of the tea-urn, I think. And the other one, the one with lined glass, is the toilet.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Ironside.

  But he spoke so quietly and the continuous spatter of the rain was so noisy that it was doubtful if Peter could have heard.

  For a few moments more the superintendent continued to contemplate the uninspiring sight of the yard. The rain with judicial impartiality battered steadily down on the two dented oil drums, the ladder with half its rungs missing, the rejected hardboard cutout of a girl with no clothes on, the pile of aged pieces of useful wood, the rusty tap on the end of the rusty standpipe and the skeleton of a once proud bicycle.

  Near the little window of Teddy Pariss’s office where the yard extended by a few feet into the neighbouring alley a rough lean-to shed had been constructed out of some sheets of rust-streaked corrugated iron. The superintendent squelched across, pushed open the door, which squeaked abominably, and put his head inside.

  He made no comment on what, if anything, he saw there but at last turned and left the rain to get on with it.

  Gratefully Peter banged the double doors closed behind them. Ironside shook the wet off.

  ‘It’s chilling, isn’t it, lad?’ he said. ‘Hardly conducive to the sort of activities our deceased friend spent his life promoting.’

  Peter laughed.

  ‘I certainly wouldn’t like to be a bathing beauty out in that lot,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Ironside, ‘there ought to be a law against it.’

  He strode into the little office again and prowled silently round the square of deep red carpet. Jack and Peter watched, expecting a revelation.

  But they were disappointed. With a clatter of feet and a good deal of noisy joking the fingerprint men, the photographer, the police surgeon and the stretcher bearers descended to fulfil their various avocations.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Ironside said, ‘I think our usefulness here has ended. The scientific forces will now discover exactly what happened.’

  The police surgeon, who had worked on cases with Superintendent Ironside before, laughed loudly.

  ‘I shall be in the room next door if anyone wants me,’ Ironside said.

  He led his two assistants out into the corridor, along to the corner and into the manager’s office. Its ranged pink blotters still awaited the considered doodlings of the judges of the great Miss Valentine contest. Its black japanned safe was still peacefully intact.

  ‘Well, now,’ Ironside said, ‘we’ve established where this terrible crime took place. No doubt in a few moments my friend, Doctor Arthur, will be able to tell me that it was indeed the knife with the charming and tasteful handle which killed the poor man. But I think before he instructs us as to when the crime took place we ought to have some facts of our own.’

  ‘If we want to get a line on the time,’ Peter said, ‘Bert Mullens, the stage-door keeper, is the bloke to ask. He’s been stuck in that box of his along the corridor all day. He ought to know what’s been happening.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Ironside. ‘He ought to know if anyone does. Suppose you call him in, Constable.’

  Peter went to the door. He looked along the broad corridor and beckoned to Bert, who had been regarding the manager’s office with mournful distrust ever since Ironside had gone into it. He came at once with shambling eagerness.

  The superintendent made a great deal of fuss sitting him down on one of the leather-covered upright chairs ranged all along the big table and making sure he was comfortable.

  ‘Well, now,’ he said at last, ‘I’ve asked you to help us, Mr Mullens, because you’re the one man who really knows what goes on round here.’

  He leant forward across the shiny surface of the table.

  ‘You know, Mr Mu
llens,’ he said, ‘it’s the man who knows who really counts in this world. He may not be the one who shouts out the orders but he’s the one who counts.’

  Slowly Bert’s tight mouth drooped open. The superintendent stayed leaning across the table crooning away to him about the delights of knowing everybody else’s business and the difficulties of a stage-door keeper’s lot. Every now and again he asked a question – what hours Bert worked, where exactly the gas-ring in his box was, just how well the clock kept time.

  And each question received a more garrulous answer.

  Standing in the background Peter caught Jack’s eye. As one they yawned.

  ‘So I suppose you would have known pretty well if anybody went down the little corridor to Mr Pariss’s room?’ Ironside said.

  Bert’s wide open mouth shut.

  ‘Pretty well,’ he said scornfully. ‘Let me tell you, I’d of known for sure. No one could have got along there without me seeing them.’

  Superintendent Ironside suddenly sat back.

  ‘You’re very certain,’ he said.

  ‘’Course I’m certain. I tell you it was more than my job was worth to let anyone in what hadn’t got permission. And you should see the lot that tried it – newspaper writers, lads out for a giggle, film men, advertising men, photographers, even old Bill Sprogson what keeps a dirty bookshop down the street. I tell you, I have to keep my eyes open.’

  The superintendent leant forward again.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a piece of luck for us that you do, Mr Mullens. You see, what we want to get at, as closely as we can, is when this attack was carried out. Now, if we know when you saw Mr Pariss last and when others saw him, we shall be half-way there.’

  ‘I never saw him at all,’ Bert said. ‘Not after he went into his office when Mr Lassington was there.’

  ‘No? Well, never mind. That tells us one thing, doesn’t it? That he stayed in the office all the time. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘He went in there when Constable Lassington was there,’ Bert said dogmatically, ‘and he never come out after that.’

  ‘Good,’ said the superintendent, ‘that’s a start. Now, did anyone go along to see him after the constable here left?’

  Now Peter and Jack were no longer yawning.

  ‘Yes, they did,’ Bert said. ‘That June Curtis saw him.’

  Jack glanced sharply at Peter. Peter was absorbed in watching the interrogation.

  ‘June Curtis?’ Ironside asked. ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘She’s one of the beauties,’ Bert answered. ‘Thirty-seven, twenty-four, thirty-six, she is.’

  Under the shaggy grey eyebrows Superintendent Ironside’s eyes blinked. But he refrained from any other comment.

  ‘Saw her coming out of his office just on twenty-five past one,’ Bert went on. ‘What she was in there for’s her own affair.’

  Jack took an impulsive step forward.

  ‘How long was she in there?’ he snapped out.

  Ironside turned and looked at him.

  ‘No doubt Mr Mullens will tell us that in his own time,’ he said.

  Slowly Jack grinned.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘The truth of the matter is I know June Curtis.’

  ‘Then you must make a really extraordinary effort to contain yourself, Constable,’ Ironside said.

  He looked round at Peter who had come up on the other side of him and was looking at Bert Mullens nearly as intently as Jack.

  ‘Constable Lassington,’ he said, ‘do you know this lady, too?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Peter answered. ‘I know of her, but I’ve never actually met her. But –’

  ‘But what, Constable?’

  Peter swallowed.

  ‘But I am a bit surprised to hear she went along to see Teddy Pariss, sir.’

  Behind Ironside’s back Jack winked at him gratefully.

  ‘Surprised?’ Bert Mullens broke in. ‘Mr Pariss was one of the judges tonight, wasn’t he? It don’t surprise me she went along to see him.’

  ‘This is a custom, is it?’ Ironside said. ‘It’s often done, this canvassing of the judges at contests of this sort?’

  Bert Mullens looked at him like a fish out of water.

  The superintendent leant forward.

  ‘What I mean is,’ he said, ‘do the girls often visit the judges in their private offices?’

  Bert looked suspicious.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘But I do know Mr Pariss weren’t averse to having a pretty girl in with him.’

  ‘I see. And this particular pretty girl came out at what time did you say?’

  ‘Twenty-five after one. I happened to look at my clock.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The clock that you take such pains to put right every morning.’

  ‘It’s because of the staff, like I said,’ Bert explained.

  The clock seemed to have a deeply symbolic meaning for him. Once mentioned, however casually, he felt a painfully obvious need to talk about it. About its rightness to a second, about its useful properties as a check on the slackness of ‘the staff’.

  It was some time before the superintendent began gently leading him back to the facts of the case. But at last he put a directly relevant question.

  ‘So Miss Curtis was the only one who saw Mr Pariss between the time Constable Lassington left him and the time you found him dead?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Bert Mullens.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, he had his secretary in there too. I heard him talking to her. Just a moment and I shall be able to think of the time.’

  They waited as Bert’s bleary eyes roved round about in search of the exact elusive minute.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I’ll be honest with you.’

  ‘Always the best policy,’ Ironside murmured comfortingly.

  ‘Yes, honest. I can’t say what time. Not really.’

  Ironside leant another inch farther forward.

  ‘But you can make a guess? A reasonable guess?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It must of been about quarter past. But give it to you to the minute I could not.’

  ‘Quarter past one?’ Ironside said. ‘Well, that hardly allows Miss Curtis much time for – er – a really thorough interview.’

  He turned quickly and looked up at Jack in time to catch an expression of unmistakable relief on his face.

  He turned back to Bert Mullens.

  ‘You did say it was at twenty-five past you saw Miss Curtis coming out of the office?’ he asked.

  Peter looked hard at the droopy face of the stage-door keeper as he replied.

  ‘Twenty-five past as she closed that door,’ he said.

  ‘You saw her close the door?’ Ironside said with sudden sharpness. ‘What were you doing there? From your box you can’t see the door.’

  Bert’s fishy eyes blinked in shock.

  7

  Superintendent Ironside stood up abruptly, pushing back the leather-seated chair. He looked down at the gaping face of the stage-door keeper.

  ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I asked you a perfectly simple question. If you saw June Curtis coming out of Teddy Pariss’s office at one twenty-five this afternoon, what were you doing there yourself? Why weren’t you in your box where you were meant to be?’

  But this sudden change of tactics, the unexpected transformation from friendly, crooning cajoler into implacable martinet, was altogether too much for the delicate susceptibilities of Mr Mullens.

  ‘You can’t pin nothing on me,’ he said. ‘Teddy Pariss is finished now, gone and done for. He won’t sack me no more. If I want I can walk out now. Right away. I can get jobs enough if I want to now.’

  ‘Oh, yes, my dear, good chap,’ Ironside said. ‘There can be no possible doubt about you being able to do exactly what you want. I never for a moment questioned it. It was just that I have to be sure of the exact time you saw June Curtis. We must, if possible, find out when Mr Pariss was killed, you know. That’s vital. And that’s
where you can help us.’

  They were back at the beginning again. Ironside seemed quite happy about it. Step by step he went over the dull, familiar ground. They had a long, happy session about the clock again. Everything that Bert Mullens had said was said once more. And at last they got back, with the utmost discretion, to the question of why the glass-walled box at the stage door had been left vacant for as much as two seconds.

  And the answer when it came was perfectly simple.

  Bert Mullens had been on his way to take a kettle out to the tap in the yard.

  ‘It wouldn’t of taken no more than a minute,’ he said. ‘But I have to boil up the old kettle otherwise the girls wouldn’t get no tea. They have it from an urn in the rest room. Half past one I was to make it for. And I was a bit late because of all that rumpus about Lindylou Twelvetrees locking herself in here, the silly little bitch.’

  He breathed heavily.

  ‘And they never got no tea in the end neither,’ he added. ‘I was just going to take the kettle off the gas when in he comes bursting with all that about the safe.’

  Bert looked over at Peter Lassington with dull malevolence.

  ‘And what time was that?’ Ironside asked conversationally.

  ‘It’d be just gone half past by then,’ Bert replied. ‘Say three minutes after the half hour.’

  ‘Now from what I was told over the telephone,’ Ironside said, ‘the warning call came to you, Lassington, at exactly half past. How long did it take you to get round here?’

  ‘It must have been less than a minute before I left the flat,’ Peter answered. ‘And then it would take only two minutes or so to get round here if you were running.’

  ‘Which brings us to one thirty-three,’ said Ironside. ‘How pleasant to find everything fitting in so well.’

  He stood up.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Mullens,’ he said. ‘You’ve been more than helpful. We’ll possibly want a formal statement from you later, but you needn’t worry about that.’

  Bert Mullens left them with the brave look of a man who could make a formal statement whenever you asked without so much as a wince.

  ‘Well, now,’ the superintendent said, ‘our friend with the thermometer and all that knowledge about rigor mortis still appears to be keeping his findings to himself. So I think we might try to see the two others who can cast their floods of light on this affair.’