‘So you found ’em,’ he said.
‘I found them,’ agreed Masters. ‘And – trouble happened sooner than you said it would. Miss Parsons got a poisoned cigarette out of a box on this young lady’s desk. Miss Stanton, Sir Henry Merrivale.’
H.M. lumbered to his feet, ducked his bald head gravely, and sat down again.
‘So,’ he muttered. ‘Is she …?’
‘Probably.’
‘And so,’ interposed Bill Cartwright, ‘you decided to come and lend us a hand after all?’
‘I’m interested in that missing film,’ howled H.M. ‘That’s all I’m interested in. Only I got a conscience. I can’t stand by and see somebody headed straight for the rollin’ mill without doing anything about it.’ His eyes fixed on Monica. Then they moved towards the door to the communicating office, behind which there was a murmur of voices.
‘I’ve seen the dramatis personae,’ he went on. ‘I had some questions I wanted to ask all of ’em. Particularly Miss Fleur.’
‘Yes,’ said Masters, ‘and fine questions they were! Begging your pardon, miss: the first question he asked her was whether, when they showed her in a bath-tub on the screen, it was a fake or the real thing.’
H.M. sniffed.
‘Well, I was curious. All my life, mostly, I’ve been wantin’ to visit a film studio. And, now that I do get a reasonable excuse to look at one, it’s as black as a coal-cellar. Y’know, Masters, I’m potentially a very fine actor myself. I’ve always thought I could play Richard the Third.’
‘You?’
‘I’d like to know why not,’ roared H.M., stung to the soul. ‘It was my great ambition in the old days. I told you I was a pal of Henry Irving. I wasn’t bald then; I was a fine figger of a man. I was always goin’ on at him to let me play Richard the Third.’
‘Oh, ah. And did he?’
‘Well, no,’ admitted H.M. grudgingly. ‘Not exactly. He said: “My dear sir, nothing would afford me greater pleasure than to allow you to play Richard the Third. But candidly, sir, if I were to allow you to play Richard the Third, or, in fact, do anything except carry a spear and keep quiet, I should have the Lyceum pulled stone from stone under me.” That’s all the artistic appreciation he had. And, with regard to artistic appreciation, we seem to have a lot of it in this place. A poisoned cigarette, hey? Poisoned with what?’
‘Belladonna,’ said Bill.
‘Belladonna. Judgin’ by your expression, I suppose that was your bright idea, too?’
‘Don’t rub it in.’ He felt badly enough as it was. Everywhere he seemed to see Tilly’s face. ‘I made some notes on belladonna, yes; but the poisoned cigarette was only one of them. I had the notes in my desk, yes. But every time you think of writing a story you don’t think somebody will …’
It was too baffling to explain. He wanted to hit out at the air.
‘Besides, the murderer needn’t have got the idea from me. I didn’t invent it. It was done in real life. One of the victims in the Mold case in 1923 was killed by a cigar impregnated with belladonna.’*
* Should anyone care to check up on William Cartwright’s facts an account of this case is in Poison Mysteries Unsolved, by C. J. S. Thompson, M.B.E., Ph.D., with a foreword by Gerald Roche Lynch (Hutchinson & Co., Ltd, 1937), p. 275.
‘Easy, son. Just tell me what happened. Wait!’
Painfully moving, H.M. reached out and touched the switch of the box-telephone.
‘That thing was on before,’ he said softly. ‘It’s off now. I’m goin’ to switch it on again; and I want you to know that everything you say will be heard by an interested group in the next room. So let’s have it hot and strong. Ready?’
Monica conquered her aversion.
‘Please!’ she said. ‘Before you go any further, there’s something you ought to know. I can tell you the only time the cigarette could have been put into that box.’
The feeling caused by her first sight of H.M. had been one of incredulous astonishment. Whatever she had expected him to look like, she had not expected him to look like that. And yet there was something about him: something.
Besides, the effect of this announcement on her listeners was electrical. H.M. stretched out his hand as though to cut off the switch of the listening-box again; but, after exchanging a glance with Masters, he kept it. Monica’s knowledge that she was talking to people in another room only strengthened her determination.
She told her story in detail, including the receipt of the third anonymous letter and Tilly’s denial of it. But before she had finished H.M. interrupted her. His exchange of glances with Masters had been growing more curious.
‘Stop a bit,’ he urged, rubbing his chin. ‘Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You bought a box of fifty cigarettes at the tobacconist’s in Marylebone Station just before you took the train?’
‘Yes.’
Chief Inspector Masters whistled through his teeth.
‘Which,’ Masters pointed out, ‘disposes of any idea that the poisoned cigarette was in the original fifty. That’s to say, sir, nobody would shove a poisoned cigarette in a box at the railway station just in the hope that Miss Stanton would come along and buy it.’
‘Be quiet, Masters,’ said H.M., putting his thick hands on his knees and bending forward. ‘Now, then. You put the original fifty in your handbag?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that bag, you say, wasn’t out of your hands from the moment you put the cigarettes in it until the time you turned ’em out into the red leather box?’
‘No, it wasn’t.’ Monica could say this firmly. ‘Even when I went into Tilly’s room for a minute or two when I came back, I carried the handbag with me.’
H.M. implored her. ‘Now for the love of Esau think hard here. Before you put the cigarettes into the leather box, was that box empty?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Positive of that, now? There couldn’t have been a stray cigarette inside?’
‘I’m absolutely positive it was empty. I even turned it upside-down to shake out some loose tobacco-crumbs.’
‘And after you dumped the cigarettes into the box, you didn’t leave the room at any time?’
‘No, not once.’
Masters, with a boiled blue eye turned strangely on her, chewed at his lower lip. ‘It’d seem,’ he said to H.M., ‘it’d seem that our man is coming right out into the open. Somebody’s got a beautiful nerve. Somebody slipped that poisoned fag into the box smack under this young lady’s eyes. It ought to be easy now. – Miss, who was in the room between the time you put the cigarettes into the box and the time Miss Parsons got the poisoned one?’
Monica shut her eyes.
‘Well, there was Tilly herself, of course …’
‘Who else?’ demanded H.M.
‘Then there was Bill. But he didn’t do it; and anyway –’ She stopped.
‘Anyway, what?’
‘Please, never mind that! We were discussing personal matters. We were –’
Bill leaned across with decision, threw the switch which cut off the listening-box, and completed the sentence for her. ‘Canoodling,’ he said. ‘It was fine. I was asking her to marry me.’
‘You never did!’
‘Well, will you?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, then,’ said Bill, and threw the switch back again.
He rather expected H.M. to hit the ceiling about this, but H.M. merely sat and stared fishily at Monica. Yet of all the refined forms of torture he could have devised for people listening in another room, this sudden break-and-return was perhaps the most effective.
‘Then,’ prompted H.M., ‘excluding this young feller, who else was there?’
‘A man called O’Brien. But he was never anywhere near the desk. He sat on the couch and stayed there.’
‘Uh-huh. Go on.’
‘The only others were Miss Fleur, Mr Hackett, and Mr Fisk.’
‘So? So any of those three could have done it?’
As though on a coloured cinema film itself, the scene was unrolling to Monica: even to the fact that she could stop the film and study it whenever she liked. Faces returned. Voices returned, and gestures, and inflexions.
‘No,’ she replied promptly.
‘What do you mean, “no”?’
‘I mean that there was one of them who definitely couldn’t have done it.’
‘Which one?’ asked H.M. Very deliberately he reached out and pressed the switch, cutting off the connexion.
‘Mr Hackett. I remember everything he did. He walked over and stood in front of me. He wasn’t in there for very long, and he wasn’t a yard away from me the whole time.’
Again H.M. exchanged a glance with the chief inspector.
‘What about the other two?’
‘Miss Fleur was there a longer time. She did go to the desk, and I remember she did put her hand on top of the box.’ Then the stark absurdity of this struck Monica; she giggled rather than laughed at the idea of the glamorous Miss Fleur being a poisoner. ‘But I didn’t see her open the box,’ Monica added.
‘So. What about the other one, the director?’
Monica hesitated.
‘He was sitting on the desk for a very few minutes. I didn’t notice what he was doing, except that he seemed to be playing with a paper-knife.’
‘Was he near the box?’
‘He was within reach of it, anyway.’
‘So you’d say’ – there was a sharp metallic plop as again H.M. pressed the switch to open the connexion to the other room – ‘you’d say that was the person likeliest to have slipped the cigarette into the box?’
Monica’s head ached. The sharp little noise of the switch was beginning to affect her own nerves.
‘I – I don’t know. It seems incredible. But then anybody seems incredible. I don’t know.’
‘Nobody else came into the room at any time?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Or could have sneaked in?’
‘Good heavens, no!’
‘Now, about those anonymous letters. Have you kept ’em all?’
‘Yes. I haven’t got the first two here, but the third is down in my desk at the Old Building now.’
‘Tilly Parsons denied having written them. Hey?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think she did?’
( Plop went the switch again.)
‘I don’t know,’ Monica answered helplessly. ‘If she did’ – she glanced at Bill – ‘I think Tilly had some good reason for doing it. I don’t want Tilly to die. You mustn’t let her die.’
It was Chief Inspector Masters who interposed here. Masters, pinching at his underlip, had been prowling back and forth in the little office, and shaking his head in a doubtful way.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ he interposed, ‘but are you SURE you’re on the right track with what you think? Just off-hand I’d say that this business of the Parsons woman has all the ear-marks of suicide. Get Mr Cartwright to tell you about it. What she said and did, and how she behaved at the time. Suppose she put the poisoned fag in the box herself; and then got a change of heart and took it herself?’
H.M. looked steadily at Monica. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Round up your story. Finish it off.’
As Monica did so, with the connexion open between the offices, Masters looked more doubtful, but H.M. only more intent: with a groping expression which grew distinctly disturbing.
‘These domestic details,’ he mumbled. ‘They’re very fascinatin’. Also – but I want to see that for myself. Now tell me. Frances Fleur, and these two fellers, Hackett and Fisk, were all in your office together. Do you remember what time they left?’
Monica considered.
‘It was well before seven o’clock. I should say twenty or twenty-five minutes to seven.’
‘Did they leave together?’
‘No. Miss Fleur went on ahead, and the other two stopped to talk to Tilly in her office.’
‘Did they now? How long were they with her?’
‘Not very long. They were in a hurry to come up and see you – or, rather, Chief Inspector Masters. They didn’t know you were here. They were only in Tilly’s room between five and ten minutes. Then they went out, and Tilly walked to the front door with them.’
Masters frowned.
‘That’d be about right, sir,’ he pointed out to H.M. ‘They met us up here at ten minutes to seven, though Miss Fleur didn’t join us until twenty past. What about it?’
H.M. silenced him with a fierce gesture. ‘And then what?’
‘Then Tilly tried to come into my room, and wanted me to join her. But I wouldn’t, and O’Brien was there, so she slammed the door and went back into her office.’
H.M. pointed a big finger towards Bill. ‘Yes. And what time did he arrive?’
‘Twenty minutes past seven. I’m sure of that.’
‘So. And how long after this did the Parsons woman come in and get the poisoned cigarette?’
‘I – I’m not sure.’
Bill cleared his throat. ‘Nor am I,’ he said, ‘in much of a position accurately to tell the time there. My impression was that it was about seven-thirty.’
‘Near enough,’ Monica acknowledged.
H.M. got to his feet.
‘Come with me, all of you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something I’d rather like to show you.’
XIII
The Forty-Ninth Proof of an Evident Truth
‘THAT’s it,’ said Bill.
He pointed to the half-smoked cigarette which still lay along the baseboard where he had kicked it.
The four of them stood in Monica’s office. They had come down to the Old Building in Bill’s car, but only after H.M. and Masters had gone into a long conference with Hackett, Fisk, and Frances Fleur. It was a conference to which Monica and Bill were not admitted; they were compelled to kick their heels and fume in an outer room. Yet, curiously enough, the conference seemed to have no noise of animosity in it. On the contrary they could have sworn they once heard a shout of jubilation from Thomas Hackett.
H.M. planted himself in the middle of the office. He was wearing a bowler hat. Owing to a complaint from the Secretary for War that H.M.’s usual headgear was a disgrace to Whitehall in wartime, he had been persuaded to replace it with a new bowler: neat, not gaudy. Yet the spectacle of H.M. in a bowler hat is one which has to be seen to be believed.
This article ornamented – let us be charitable – his head as he peered round, sniffing the air. He lumbered over to where the cigarette lay; he bent over and with infinite labour picked it up. He smelt it.
‘This is the little joker, right enough,’ he said. ‘Have a whiff, Masters.’
The chief inspector studied it, and scowled uneasily.
‘Oh, ah. But see here, sir: how was it done? This looks like an ordinary Player’s cigarette. Got the name printed on the unsmoked end, and everything. If the murderer soaked his tobacco in a solution of belladonna and then rolled it, he did a very neat job. It’s not so easy to roll a cigarette so it looks like a machine-made one.’
‘I can tell you how to do that,’ said Bill. ‘Tilly told me.’
Masters swung round sharply. ‘Miss Parsons told you?’
‘Yes. It seems that in New York you can buy little machines for rolling cigarettes at any drug-store. The state recently put up the price of cigarettes to eighteen cents for twenty – about ninepence at the normal rate of exchange, though Lord knows what it is now – and a number of people have taken to rolling their own. If you used English tobacco and a Player’s cigarette-paper (though I don’t know where you’d get that) you could make a perfect counterfeit. Tilly has one of the little gadgets herself.’
The chief inspector’s brow darkened with suspicion.
‘Is that so, now?’ he mused, in a sinister voice. ‘So the lady’s got one herself, has she?’
H.M. was not impressed.
‘Oh, Masters, my son!’ he said wearily. ‘Stop goin’ off the de
ep end again! I can tell you an easier way than that. Just dip half of the cigarette into your solution, and let it dry. The colour of the paper will be a bit different afterwards, but not noticeably. Belladonna – don’t you remember we ran into its derivative, atropine, in the Felix Haye case? – is a colourless liquid. The maker’s name proves it, son.’
‘Not to me it doesn’t,’ snapped Masters. ‘Just you look here, sir.’
He went to the red leather box on the desk, and tapped it.
‘Presumably,’ he went on, ‘there was only one poisoned fag in here. That’s to say, it isn’t likely the murderer would have shoved in a whole handful. Anyway, we can find out by counting them. But’ – he raised a finger impressively – ‘there was one doctored cigarette and fifty harmless ones. And Miss Parsons gets the doctored one first crack out of the box. No, sir. That’s not reasonable: unless she knew which one it was. And I’ll just lay you a little bet she did.’
H.M. eyed him curiously.
‘So you see somethin’ fishy about it, too?’ he inquired. ‘Uh-huh. Just a minute.’
In an absent-minded way he went to the door of Tilly’s office, opened it, and blinked at the room inside. The light was still on; a faint odour of the cigarette still remained. The room was, as usual, strewn with crumpled papers. A cup of now-cold coffee stood on the desk beside the standing ash-tray.
H.M. lumbered over. He looked at the ash-tray, its edges scarred with burns. He examined the cup of coffee. Then he went wandering round the room, inspecting everything.
‘I say,’ he called out. They could not see his face. ‘Was the gal drinkin’ coffee just before the poison got her?’
Masters was after this like a terrier.
‘Hold on, sir! What’s the game? Is there a double-cross in this? Are you trying to tell us she might have got the poison in the coffee?’
‘No,’ said H.M. ‘The poison was in the cigarette all right.’ Still without looking round at them, he put his hands up to his temples and pressed them there. ‘I was askin’ a plain question, and I’d like a plain answer. Was she drinking coffee when the poison got her?’
Monica and Bill exchanged glances.
And So To Murder Page 17