The Cummings Report

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  “Hardly,” she replied. I could see she was undecided about something. I didn’t persist in asking her what she did in these rather formidable surroundings. But, of course, it had to be something vaguely secret — hence the large and suspicious-minded commissionaire on the door. Alice read my thoughts.

  “Don’t get dramatic ideas, Joel,” she said. “Every government department is surrounded by a suitable air of mystery. It’s part of the stock-in-trade.”

  I let it go at that, and switched back to the immediate problem in hand. “The point is, Alice: do you think this is worth following up? Of course, as you have a job you may not have time to do what I was going to suggest.”

  “That all depends what it is.”

  “Consider,” I said. “If there is anything in what I witnessed, it may be they are using that particular cinema as a regular meeting place; once a week, once a month, or even every day, if there is a lot of traffic of information to deal with.”

  “Quite.”

  “Well obviously, if I go back there too often, it might give rise to suspicion — after all, they are obviously taking great pains to escape detection. Therefore, the only way of having any hope of intercepting a message again — if there is any message to intercept ...”

  “... You don’t have to keep on adding riders,” she intervened. “Let’s assume, for the moment, that you’re right, that something is up.”

  “Fair enough. Then the only way we can intercept them again is to have the place watched.”

  “What time was it when you went into the café?”

  “About one o’clock. Of course, there’s no means of knowing whether that is the regular time.”

  “But it’s reasonable to assume it is,” said Alice. “You see, if this is the only way the two parties are allowed to communicate, they must have some method of knowing when and where they can expect to meet. They won’t be easy to spot, though.”

  “You mean, they might use different people as well?”

  “Yes.” She was making some notes on a pad. “I’m interested in this chap with the wig,” she said. “You haven’t described him.”

  “There was nothing to describe. Just a face, and somebody else’s hair. It didn’t fit very well, either.”

  “And you think he was a phoney.’

  “Very phoney. He was trying to pass himself off as a member of some kind of underground movement; but it didn’t ring true.”

  “Ever seen him before in Rimsworth?”

  “Well, I hardly ever went into the town.”

  We lit cigarettes. “You know, Joel,” said Alice, “there’s something very odd about all this. I wonder whether it strikes you quite as it does me? You see, it’s all sopat, isn’t it? After all, you were only a few yards from the news theatre when that man accosted you.”

  “I still don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  “Doesn’t it strike you as a bit of a coincidence? I mean, why should they chooseyou, particularly? You see, if they have checked your background as they say they have — and I do not doubt it — they must know that you are a close friend of mine. Perhaps not knowing about our ‘bust up’, your bewigged friend would naturally have assumed that you would tell me all about it. (Well, it so happens you did, anyway.) So only an hour or so after it all happens, here you are talking to someone in Intelligence. Those women might just as well have come and talked for all they’re worth about the number 22 bus, right here in this office.”

  “In other words, old wig-head did a pretty good job in tracking down some suspects and getting the information quickly to the right place?”

  She didn’t say anything for a while. Then: “Joel, I have to be pretty careful what I say to you — you know, security and all that — but perhaps I can say this: I knew a bit about this before you got here. So it looks as ifeverybodyis makingquite sure that I know, doesn’t it? Oh well — six-thirty at my flat, Joel. And turn on the charm.”

  I got up to leave. “I think you’re mad, Alice,” I said. “But you’re quite a woman. Viewed from a safe distance that is!”

  CHAPTER 4

  IT was just eight o’clock when I left Alice’s fiat in the new Hill man, with Jill Crescent beside me in the front seat. I had decided to take her to a musical, and there was just time to reach the theatre before the curtain was due to go up — I loathe arriving late. So I concentrated on my driving and didn’t offer any conversation.

  It was Jill who broke the ice — if with a somewhat urgent note.

  “I’m dreadfully sorry,” she said, staring straight ahead through the windscreen, “but I want to spend a penny.”

  “Can you wait,” I asked, “until we ...?”

  “No,” she replied, very definitely, “I can’t.”

  I pulled up opposite the Ritz Hotel, and waited five precious minutes while she availed herself of its famous hospitality. We then continued our journey in silence. I repeat, I dislike being late for a show.

  We did not have gangway seats, and I know I trod on at least three pairs of feet — I counted them. Scene one, which happened to be particularly gentle and sensitive, was playing by the time we had finally settled, amid a certain amount of tooth-clicking on the part of our immediate neighbours. Embarrassment of this nature brings out a rather sadistic streak in me, I’m afraid, and I made Jill feel it. There are ways of saying, “It’s perfectly all right!”, when a girl apologizes, that can speak volumes.

  By the first interval Jill had obviously decided she did not like going out with composers. The situation did not greatly improve in the stalls bar, when a large, opulent-looking man managed to jog her arm at the wrong moment and a large quantity of gin (which was luckily watered down in a manner unique to theatre bars) cascaded down her very new dress.

  By the end of the show (which, not unnaturally, neither of us liked very much) we were what is best described as ‘not speaking’. And my half-hearted offer of a nightclub was, as I had anticipated, politely refused.

  The rest of the evening (all fifteen minutes of it) I decline to describe, except to mention that she made me feel to the full my ungraciousness over her misfortune on the way to the theatre. She had a lot of pride and it had received a severe blow. She was therefore extremely angry.

  I was back in my flat by eleven-thirty, feeling in a very bad temper indeed. I am sure that she slept better than I did. My ill-temper was enhanced by the fact that I knew I had behaved extremely badly, and that she obviously didn’t like me at all.

  Alice phoned me at eleven the following morning.

  “Come round,” she said, “I want to talk to you.”

  “Not if it’s about your little Miss Crescent,” I said.

  “Oh.” There was much understanding in the single syllable. “I wondered why she was so brisk and bright this morning. Anyway, I didn’t phone you about her. I’ve got one or two ideas about your other problem. When can you come round?”

  I looked at my watch. “Let’s say noon. I’m not dressed yet.”

  “Right. Incidentally, we’re trying out a theory.”

  “What kind of theory?”

  “About your two cronies at the news theatre. We think they might be professional actors.”

  “Well, they could be, I suppose. They could be anything. What about it?”

  “Don’t you see? If they’re actors, then there’s some chance of tracing them.”

  “It’s a very long shot,” I said.

  “I know. What else do you suggest?”

  “What about tracing my man in a toupée?” I said.

  “We’re trying; but all he’s got to do is to take the wig off, and what are we left with? A man you can’t describe. Look; let’s leave it at that for the moment. I’ll see you at midday.”

  “All right. And you go on with your theory. It sounds marvellous. I expect it’ll turn out to be Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe all the time.”

  *

  It was exactly midday when I found some parking space at last, ju
st off Victoria Street. A few minutes later I came face to face with the commissionaire. He let me in with silent tolerance, this time.

  Jill greeted me with exactly the same smile as she had before, which proved my point. She was just a type 3(b) stenographer (female) after all. But her eyes were grave, and revealed a quality I had missed before.

  “Good afternoon!” she said briskly, “Miss Redgate is ready for you.”

  I returned her sweet, professional beam. “Thank you very much,” I said.

  “Hallo, Cummings!” said a voice from the inner office. It was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it for the moment.

  By the time Jill had shut the door I had recognized its owner. “Dandy!” I exclaimed. “Dandy Roberts! What on God’s Earth are you doing here?”

  I had known Dandy since I had first ventured into the theatrical business. He looked just the same as ever now, with his wrinkled, puckered-up but rather humorous face. He looked more like a bookie than a theatrical agent; no doubt he had been one at some time or other during his long and varied career. Some humorist had christened him ‘Dandy’ because he had never been known to wear a suit of clothes that even remotely fitted him. Now he was as sloppily dressed as ever; but he was somebody to be reckoned with in the theatre world these days.

  Once again I gave Alice full marks. If anyone could trace a pair of character actors on the loose, Dandy Roberts could; and if we drew blank the probabilities were very strongly in favour of Alice’s theory being wrong.

  “Could you describe them?” asked Dandy, when we had told him enough to arouse his interest.

  “They had their backs to me most of the time,” I said. “And while they were talking I didn’t notice much more than the fact that one wore a hat straight out of a repertory wardrobe department, and the other wore spectacles and was answering to the name of Gertrude. But I got a glimpse of them as I went out, and I did notice that the one without the glasses had a mole on her cheek — the left one, I think.”

  Dandy scratched his head. “Hm! A mole on her cheek. Might have been part of the make-up, of course. Anything else?”

  “Nothing distinctive,” I replied. “As I said, they fitted in very well; weren’t intended to be conspicuous.”

  “You’d better come back to my office and have a look at the rogues’ gallery,” said Dandy. “There’s not much to go on, but we might find a photograph that rings a bell.”

  “By the way,” I asked Alice, “why are you so sure that there actuallywas any message? Most people would have accused me of imagining the whole thing.”

  “I’m not sure,” she said carefully. “But things like this are sometimes worth following up.”

  “But you know something. Don’t you?”

  Alice ignored me for a moment. “Dandy, I wish you’d give your new home number to my secretary, will you, darling? I had an awful job getting hold of you.”

  Dandy got the message, and disappeared rapidly into the outer office. When he had shut the door behind him, I looked inquiringly at Alice. “Well?” I said.

  “Remember your business man? Bowler hat and briefcase and a broken nose? One of our chaps.”

  “He was very thorough,” I acknowledged, trying to take this information in my stride, “looking at the Reuter’s machine and everything.”

  “Very thorough,” agreed Alice. “One of our best men. His only weakness is he hates buses. Hardly ever goes on them. That’s probably why he never noticed a thing. Anyway, he was tipped off to be there by twelve, and he waited until you saw him leave, at about one-fifteen. He couldn’t stay any longer without looking very conspicuous. So you see, that makes two of you who were warned to be there — only, you saw something and he didn’t.”

  I fought to conceal one of those infuriating little smug smiles with which I am cursed whenever I think I’ve been rather clever. “Did you know this when I saw you yesterday?” I asked, deliberately killing the offending smile at source with an effort.

  “Not for certain,” she said, “but it added up. As soon as I reported what you had told me, it all checked.”

  “It’s rather lucky you phoned me yesterday,” I observed.

  Alice was laughing at me now.

  “What’s the joke?” I demanded a little indignantly.

  “My dear Joel,” she said, “you are certainly stretching the long arm of coincidence a bit far. But as a matter of fact, of course, it wasn’t coincidence at all. Our bowler-hatted friend saw you, and thought you were a possible contact! He photographed you, and the print was identified very quickly by a department that specializes in that sort of thing.”

  “Well!” I remonstrated. “Why the blazes didn’t you tell me that yesterday?” I was beginning to feel a bit of a fool.

  “Because, my ex-love, I couldn’t be absolutely certain you weren’t!”

  “You mean to say ...”

  “In this business you can’t be sure of anybody. For all I know, Murtha House might be a den of thieves. Who knows what strange ideas might not have been pumped into you on the psychiatrist’s couch? It’s all right; don’t burst a blood vessel! I didn’t think it very likely — but we had to be sure. I’ve had you screened since yesterday.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or throw things. It seemed so fantastic that she should doubt the very person with whom she had once claimed to be passionately in love!

  Jill was not in the office when we left, and I found myself wishing again that the previous evening hadn’t been such a fiasco.

  As we sped towards Dandy Roberts’ office in Gerrard Street, I started thinking about Alice, and her antics over the past twenty-four hours. Her sheer, unadulterated cunning had betrayed her for all time as someone nobody should ever be in love with. She knew I found her the easiest person in the world to talk to, and so she didn’t have to arouse my suspicions. All she had to do, when she had received the information from Bowler Hat, was to keep telephoning until I reached home, and pretend she could not bear to be without me (she knows how conceited I am about women). Having thus made sure that I hadn’t time to discuss my discovery with anyone else, she had only to lure me round to her office and wait for me to tell my story, as she knew I would. After that it had been plain sailing. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Jill had left me so peremptorily after the theatre, I would even have suspected that her only reason for enlisting Jill was to check on my movements.

  Damn! I didn’t want to think about Jill.

  All the same, she made pleasant ruminating in a taxi that was caught in the clutches of a traffic jam; and Dandy was deeply occupied with that thick wad of paper calledVariety. I don’t often notice what women are wearing; but I could picture that dress of Jill’s all right, the dress that rustled so angrily when she climbed out of my car and said such a brief good-night ...

  “Are you going to sit in the taxi all day?” asked Dandy, looking at me quizzically.

  I pulled myself together; we went in.

  “Now then,” said Dandy, lighting up a horrible-looking, half-smoked cigar, “let’s see. We can rule outSpotlight, for a start; for I take it we are looking for someone who has probably been chosen because she is unknown.” He drew upon his cigar and choked immediately. “Agnes!” he said, still choking, “find me the book on Provincial Character Actresses.” He turned back to me. “We make up these books ourselves,” he explained. “They are not necessarily people we represent, but you’d be surprised how much business you can pick up if you can find just the right sort of face at the right time — got it?”

  “Here it is,” said Agnes, in a flat voice which suited her appearance to perfection. She held in her hand a large, tattered scrap-book, which looked as if it had travelled round the British Isles for many years.

  “You can go to lunch, now, Agnes,” said Dandy.

  CHAPTER 5

  We found nothing.

  I never realized how many people there were in the acting profession — orhalf in it; for most of these photographs we saw had a
pathetically short list of engagements to their credit. Yet each of their case histories told a little story. But of my two cronies there was no sign.

  *

  I heard the clatter of footsteps on the stairs, accompanied by some rather unmelodious humming. Agnes had returned from lunch.

  Dandy’s cigar had long since gone out, but he crunched it ferociously between his teeth. Apparently he never looked at Agnes, for he still had his head buried in a stack of miscellaneous photographs when he addressed her.

  “Agnes, I’m looking for a female character actor with a mole on her cheek, about forty or forty-five years of age. Any ideas?”

  “Female — character — actor ...” she said as she wrote, in a rather uncertain-looking copper-plate handwriting. “Mole on — cheek — about — forty-five.” She paused for a moment, staring at her notebook in placid contemplation.

  The telephone shrilled into the silence. Dandy answered. “Yes?” he said. “Oh, put her on, please.” He covered up the phone. “It’s Alice ... Hallo kid! No luck so far, I’m afraid. Shall I put your boy friend on? ... That so? Now I know he’s nuts! Well, here he is, anyway.”

  “I’ve looked at about a million faces,” I said into the instrument, “but there isn’t one that fits. I thought it was rather a long shot.”

  “Keep trying,” she said, “you never know. Of course, we may be completely on the wrong tack, but we’ve nothing else to go on. I had the cinema watched today but nothing happened. Ring me up tomorrow morning.”

  Then I did an idiotic thing. “Is Jill there?” I asked.

  There was a moment’s silence, then a low laugh. One of those little utterances of Alice’s that had always sent my blood pressure up several points. “Well,” said Alice, “she’shere. But you’d better be a lot nicer to her this time!” Another pause. I lit a cigarette. I was surprised to find that I was quite nervous.

  “Jill Crescent speaking,” said a distinctly chilly voice. Chilly, but crisp and feminine and fresh.

  “This is Joel Cummings,” I said, “and I want to make an appointment to have my head examined.”