The Doors Open

by Michael Gilbert

  Paddy had no idea what the Stassen-Caulfield internal checking system might be but he did know Messrs Broomfields, whose worn brass plate has looked out on the Friars for nearly two hundred years – Messrs Broomfields, who were so efficient and respectable that they had once publicly censured the Treasury for financial incompetence in underwriting a Government bond issue.

  “Would you like a word with Brandison?”

  “Good God, no,” said Paddy. “I’ve nothing to say to him. He was just a lay figure in my theory of a crime which doesn’t seem to have been committed at all. I had made the mistake of imagining that the end might justify the means, without enquiring too closely if the end really existed.”

  “If you talk like that,” said Mr Legate, getting to his feet with a smile, “you’ll be mistaken for a Communist.”

  “Oh, come,” said Paddy, “I haven’t sunk so low as that.”

  For a moment a flicker of some emotion showed in Mr Legate’s eyes. Then abruptly he held out his hand and said, “Well, thank you for coming along. I may see you at the inquest. Goodbye.”

  3

  The inquest on Arthur Britten of Sunset Avenue, Staines, and late an employee of the Stalagmite Insurance Corporation, was decently devoid of incident. Police witnesses first described the finding of the body, and a faded sister from Kennington spoke to identification. Patrick Yeatman-Carter, also of Sunset Avenue, was then put into the box. He stated that he had been a neighbour of the deceased and had known him slightly. He spoke of a drink taken with the deceased on the way home from the station. No, he was not prepared to swear that the deceased had had too much to drink. He was not pressed on the point. The coroner understood that the deceased had made a communication to Mr Yeatman-Carter indicating that he was in certain financial difficulties. That was so. Then doubtless they would hear more about this aspect of the case from the next witness. Mr Legate took the stand and expressed the official sympathy of the Stalagmite Insurance Corporation for the relatives of the deceased. He indicated briefly the steps which had led to Mr Britten’s dismissal. The jury without retiring gave it as their unanimous opinion that Mr Britten had taken his own life whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed.

  And that the King be so informed.

  It was some three weeks later that Paddy, shortly after arriving at the office in the morning, was surprised to hear that Mr Barrowbridge wished to see him.

  The senior partner of Watson and Barrowbridge, and the third generation of that name in the firm, was a chartered accountant, born, nurtured and bred. An irreverent junior once said that he probably struck his first balance sheet between wet nappies and dry nappies. He was small and pompous, and suffered from a slight impediment in his speech.

  However, despite these personal failings, he had a professional gift of exposition and Paddy hadn’t been two minutes in the room before he was quite clear about one thing.

  He was getting the sack.

  He heard disconnected portions of Mr Barrowbridge’s discourse. “Cutting down our executive staff…opportunities for a young man in a larger firm…glad to recommend him…no complaints about his work…aftermath of war…retrenchment… genuinely sorry…”

  It was over in five minutes and then Paddy found himself in the passage. To say that he was startled would be putting it mildly.

  Paddy, as has been suggested, was typical of his class. A good regimental officer, with a capacity for hard work, a measure of persistence (witness his dealings with Mr Legate) and a good deal of loyalty towards that institution with which he happened to be connected – whether it was a school, a battalion, or a business house. Not overgifted with brains perhaps – though as far as he knew he had been doing his work well enough. When he had first been articled to the firm it had been understood that a post would be found for him as a qualified man. A subordinate post at first – leading up eventually, possibly, to something rather good. Perhaps even a junior partnership.

  Of course there had been nothing in writing. No service contract. But then, in professional firms these things were never expressed in form.

  “What the hell,” thought Paddy. “What the hell have I gone and done? If I’ve put my foot in it somehow, I think old Barrows might have had the decency to tell me, instead of just fluffing.”

  He didn’t feel like facing the office for the moment. He supposed he’d have to tell them. There was certain to be a lot of chaff, or worse still, they might be sympathetic.

  Paddy thought that a cup of coffee might be a good idea. He’d slip out and get one – not through the general office, there was bound to be a crowd there: out the back way, past the cashiers.

  He made his way down the stairs, into the basement, and along the passage. Apart from the cashiers, who had the front office, there were two little rooms at the back used as waiting-rooms or spare conference rooms for clients who wanted to examine accounts.

  As Paddy passed the second of these he noticed that the door was ajar and he glanced inside. A man was sitting at the table. He looked up as Paddy went past and showed his teeth in a grin.

  Even without the green eyeshade, the hooked nose and the actor’s blue chin were unmistakable.

  3

  Introducing a Number of People

  Paddy’s long legs had carried him out into the street before the full enormity of the situation suddenly struck him.

  “That’s the blighter from the Stalagmite,” he thought. “Surely he can’t have – good God, I wonder if he’s been getting at old Barrows? But why in the name of Heaven should he? What’s it got to do with him?”

  Becoming aware that he was holding up the traffic, he removed himself to the safety of the pavement.

  “Of course, if the Stalagmite wanted to do me a bad turn, I suppose they’ve got a terrific pull with a firm like ours. We get such a lot of work from them.”

  Common sense here took the opportunity of pointing out that this last fact afforded quite an innocent reason for the presence of an employee of the Stalagmite in the offices of Messrs Watson and Barrowbridge.

  Instinct, however, would have none of it.

  “Curse it,” said Paddy, “he had a bloody shifty look. And what was he doing in our basement? No one ever goes down there. He was probably waiting to be told that I’d received the order of the boot.”

  His first reaction to this thought was that it would be a good thing to go back and kick someone. The gentleman from the Stalagmite for preference. Or even the venerable Mr Barrowbridge. Fortunately by this time he was far enough away from the office for common sense to prevail. As an alternative method of relieving his feelings he entered the nearest telephone box and rang up his fiancée.

  2

  Miss Burke was an interesting example of the crimes which can be committed in baptism. Her mother, a devotee of the works of Madame de Staël, had overridden the wishes of her husband, the doctor – as, indeed, she did in most matters – and christened her fourth child Corinne Delphine Burke. Since neither name was at all suitable for nursery usage, her three elder brothers, when they had been moved to address her, had called her Fluff, Nipper, Beany, and other names, less elegant, and immaterial to this narrative. At school, being smallish and not easily suppressed, she had been known as Bunny. On the first day of her first job in London, when asked her Christian name, it had occurred to her that the time had come to strike a blow for personal liberty. “Jennifer,” she had announced boldly, “but my friends call me Jenny.”

  And Jenny it had remained, through a succession of jobs as typist, assistant, and secretary.

  She was the possessor of what Paddy, in a rash moment of candour, had once called a serviceable face. Yet a great many men had found her attractive, whilst wondering what on earth it was that attracted them; and if they were of an analytical turn of mind had probably decided in the end that it was the mixture of friendliness, loyalty and unadulterated cheek.

  She and Paddy had been friends for a number of years and they had celebrated his promotion
to a majority by announcing their engagement. She sat now, in a little Hungarian restaurant at the end of Charlotte Street, listening thoughtfully whilst her husband-to-be blew off steam.

  “So that’s how it is,” Paddy concluded. “It’s all utter surmise and guesswork. But if you’d seen the look on that blighter’s face, Jenny. He was positively leering.”

  Jenny scraped the last fragment of crême caramel from her plate before saying, “It might have been stomach-ache, darling. I had an uncle once who suffered from terrible stomach-ache. He always seemed to be leering.”

  “Well, it might have been stomach-ache,” agreed Paddy, “but personally I don’t believe it. It’s too much of a coincidence. Look at it this way. I stick my nose into the affairs of the Stalagmite, and, what happens? I get the sack for no reason at all. Then I spot this blighter in our office, hiding more or less, in a little room in the basement. What was he doing there? If he wanted to see Barrows, he’d have been up in the waiting-room.”

  “But how should these Stalagmites be able to do a thing like that? Even if they wanted to.”

  “We get about three-quarters of our business through them,” said Paddy gloomily. “In fact, we’re almost a – well, anyway, you can take it from me, that part of it’s perfectly possible.”

  “All right,” said Jenny. “What do we do about it?”

  Despite the fact that Paddy’s unexpected telephone call had brought her out to dinner in her office clothes, with no resources beyond those contained in her two-by-four handbag, she yet contrived to look extremely fetching in a very simple tailored dress of the softest blue angora, worn under a beaver-lamb coat, which effectively kept out the bitter January cold.

  “What I want to do,” said Paddy, “is to wring someone’s neck. Only it all seems so hopeless. There’s no sort of proof. It’s just my hunch.”

  “What about Barrows?”

  “What do you mean, Jenny?”

  “I mean, what about wringing his neck? In a nice, legal way of course. Isn’t he bound to employ you, as an ex-service man? I believe there’s a sort of tribunal you can go to. Or wrongful dismissal. That’s it! Let’s issue a writ against the firm. Think how old Barrows would hate it.”

  “Look here,” said Paddy. “This working in a solicitor’s office isn’t doing you any good. It’s putting ideas into your head. All the same,” he added thoughtfully, “I think you may have something. How shall we set about it?”

  “I’ll ask our Mr Rumbold,” said Jenny. “He’s certain to be helpful. He’s a sweet thing, and rather keen on me.”

  “If I catch young Nap casting so much as a fatherly eye at you, let alone a brotherly one,” said Paddy, “I’ll wring his neck.”

  “Hurry up and finish your coffee,” said Jenny, “and we’ll be in time for the last house at the Dominion.”

  3

  The gentleman referred to by Jenny as “our Mr Rumbold” and by Paddy as “young Nap”, Mr Noel Anthony Pontarlier Rumbold, was sitting in his office. He was the very latest thing in junior partners in his father’s firm, Messrs Markby, Wragg and Rumbold, Solicitors, of Coleman Street.

  He listened carefully to what his father’s secretary had to say and then remarked: “I’ll think it out, Jenny. On the face of it I don’t think there’s much we can do. You see, when Paddy went away he was an articled clerk. Mr Barrowbridge was under an obligation to take him back as that, of course, quite apart from the war. But once he was qualified the obligations would be at an end. At least, I think so. I’ll ask the old man. He’s had a lot of reinstatement cases lately. Look here, why don’t you bring him round to my place for dinner tonight? It’s years since I saw him last–”

  It was not every young bachelor, in that year of grace, who could ask people round to “his place” for dinner. And Nap owed it to his father’s foresight that he possessed a set of chambers in Brick Court, in the Middle Temple. A priceless set of rooms which had last been “renovated” in the year of Dr Johnson’s birth and had received a lick of paint and a new door knocker when Dickens was a Parliamentary reporter.

  Jenny, though scandalized by some of Nap’s housekeeping arrangements, was deeply in love with the apple-green Queen Anne panelling and after dinner that night she said, without malice, “I expect Patricia is really marrying you for your chambers, Nap.”

  “Fine set of rooms,” agreed Paddy, from the depths of a leather armchair. He was in the comfortable process of settling down to an after-dinner glass of port, the remains of twelve dozen which Mr Rumbold senior had optimistically hoped might cheer his own declining years. “Built for undersized chaps like you, though. I should always be knocking my head on your twiddly little doorways.”

  “It’s divine,” said Jenny. “And I think it’s got the most beautiful and complicated lavatory in London – if I may mention such a thing in front of a couple of young unmarried men.”

  Nap lit himself a cigarette and looked at his two guests speculatively. With his absurdly boyish face, light hair and candid blue eyes he looked, as Paddy had once said, “nineteen and devoid of all guile”. In fact he was twenty-six and a far from simple soul.

  Some of which complication may have resulted from the fact that five-sixteenths of his breeding was French. As to one-sixteenth from his great-grandfather, the Jacobin attorney, Rimbault, who had crossed the Channel with speed and discretion on learning the result of the Battle of Waterloo, and as to the remaining quarter from his grandmother, a Malmaison from Besançon (eighty-one but still hearty).

  “All present,” he said, “are thanked for their kind remarks on the subject of my apartments. We will now proceed to business. First item on the agenda, possible reprisals against Mr Barrowbridge. I’m afraid you’re on a sticky wicket there. What I told you, Jenny, this morning is confirmed by my father.”

  “I’m not even sure,” interrupted Paddy, “that I wish any harm to old Barrows. He’s a thundering ass in many ways, and he doesn’t think anything exists unless it can be put into a balance sheet, but that’s as far as my feelings go, I think he’s been got at – by the Stalagmite. They’re the people we ought to go for.”

  “I’ve heard most of the story from Jenny,” said Nap, “but it’ll do no harm to have it plainly. What exactly do you suspect?”

  “I think,” said Paddy slowly, “that someone at the Stalagmite, probably the chief cashier, is up to the neck in some funny business. And there’s the bloke with the broken nose and blue chin who looks more like a third-class repertory actor than an insurance operative. He’s in it, too. I think that poor old Britten came across something – some secret – he mayn’t even have known what it meant.”

  “All right. That’s all possible. What happened next?”

  “I don’t know. To start with I thought that the people he was interfering with might – well, they might have had him pushed into the river. If there was enough money involved, you know–”

  “Don’t apologize,” said Nap. “People do push other people into rivers even in this highly mechanized age. Your suspicions, I take it, arose chiefly from the disappearance of the wallet.”

  “Yes. But now I know what the papers were – I told you what Legate said – well, frankly I’m back where I started. It might have been suicide. I don’t know what to think.”

  “But the light–” said Jenny.

  “I know, I know. It seemed beautifully watertight when I first worked it out: but perhaps the best explanation is the simple one. Mr Britten, must have been worried stiff, about getting the sack and everything else. Perhaps he did leave the light on when he went to work that morning.”

  “And the curtains drawn?”

  “Well – yes. And the curtains drawn.”

  “Do you know,” went on Paddy, “between you and me, when I left the Stalagmite that afternoon, I was absolutely certain that I’d been making a fool of myself. I think if Legate had blustered or bluffed or refused to see me, it might have been different. But he took the whole thing so quietly, and expla
ined what he could, and didn’t waste time trying to explain what he couldn’t.”

  Nap said, “Yes, now you’re back again where you started – as you said. You just don’t know. So let me ask you a simple question. Do you want to find out?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you want to stir up any more trouble? Mr Britten’s dead. A coroner has sat on him. The case is closed.”

  “No, by God, it isn’t,” said Paddy. “Look here, if they’d left me alone, I’d have agreed with you. But they went out of their way to kick me. And I’m not going to take that lying down. I don’t know what I’m going to do – but I’m going to do something.”

  ‘‘Bravo,” said Jenny and clapped her hands softly.

  “All right,” said Nap, “I was only asking. I never thought you’d climb down. As a matter of fact I’ve given a good deal of thought to this business and I’ve got a suggestion to make. Two suggestions.”

  He fished in the desk behind him and brought out a crumpled copy of a paper.

  “Do you know this publication?”

  “Why, yes – The Moorgate Press. It’s a financial rag isn’t it? A weekly.”

  “It’s one of the best in the City, in its own quiet way. It carries a high proportion of advertisement, of course, but I’m told that its ‘Market Forecast’ and Tips to Investors’ are quite out of the ordinary. Those who read it swear that it’s the next best thing to the oracle at Delphi.”

  “And where do I come in?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I know the editor. A very decent bloke, called Cartwright. I happened to see him yesterday and he told me he wanted a legman.”