“But really, Miss Oissel,” Robert protested, “the police can’t work in the dark. Why not tell them?”
“Because if the book has gone it has gone, and it is better that whoever has it should not know that we attach any special importance to it.”
“If you feel like that, then I will help. Can you tell me what it was like?”
“Quite small, quite shabby—a black leather book. The entries are in cipher. If the thieves can find the key to the cipher it will be very serious. If not—then the less said, I think, the better.”
“But that might be a very important clue,” said West. “If we could find out the people who might know the cipher…”
“No one knew the cipher. Grandpère once told me that he and a friend had made it up together many years ago.”
“Then that friend… do you know who he was?”
“No, probably he isn’t alive now. I never asked my grandfather any questions. That is why I was the only person he could endure to have near him for long, except Pierre of course. I never showed the faintest interest in his affairs, or felt any.”
“Could anything interest you?” asked Robert. He badly wanted to bring the conversation round to something more personal than the affairs of Georges Oissel.
“I suppose I should not show it if anything did,” Annette answered with her slow smile. “I have lived for twenty years with my grandfather, Mr West. That is good training, believe me.”
She rose, and West collected her gloves and handbag for her. Training, yes, but for what? Why were the Oissels so secretive? Had they had things to hide even from each other? Was Annette hiding something now, or was she trying in some oblique way to give him hints—she who had been so determined that the police should not conclude that her grandfather died by his own hand? As he piloted her through the lane between the crowded tables Robert felt more interest in this woman than in any human being he had ever met. So absorbed in her was he that he did not even remember to smile at Grace Richards as they passed her table.
CHAPTER VIII
The Members’ cloakroom is one of those quiet places for intimate gossip in the House of Commons where a whispered word may sometimes have more effect than an hour’s speech thundered in the debating chamber. Coat and hat pegs line one side of an L-shaped corridor in the oldest part of the building. At one end is a small room without a door. It is the place where the death-warrant of Charles the First was signed. A good few invisible signatures ending other reputations have been affixed by the gossip in the cloakroom. Its genie is a tubby man who sells matches, cigarettes, Parliamentary gazettes, and other little things which help to make M.P.s happy.
Colonel Stuart-Orford was coming out of the cloakroom as Robert passed on his way back to the Members’ Lobby after seeing Annette to her car.
“Could I have a word with you, Robert?”
With an irritated mental shrug, but an outwardly polite “Certainly,” Robert followed the Colonel back into the cloakroom, and propped himself against the antique weighing-machine that has told the sad truth to generations of increasing statesmen. Colonel Stuart-Orford was the representative of too much that was typical of his party for a Parliamentary private secretary to ignore him.
Stuart-Orford was county and country, the Army and the Great British Tradition.
“I am concerned about the affaire Oissel, Robert.”
“So are we all, Colonel, I can assure you. The Minister more than any of us.”
“I am not particularly concerned about the death of this man. It might be a useful sanitary measure if a few of his kind were put against a wall. But it seems to me as though the Government has actually put itself in the power of men like that. I don’t like it, Robert. I do not like it. Imagine what Palmerston or Disraeli would have said at the idea of Britain going cap in hand to such a creature for money… the British Government… damn it, Robert, was this why we fought the War?”
“I was at school when you were fighting that war, Colonel, and I supposed that you all knew what you were doing, but it’s left a pretty mess to be cleared up. And the England it has left is not the England of Palmerston and Victoria. We’ve got to deal with the facts, and American dollars are about the biggest of those facts. We’ve got to have them, so it’s no use getting high and mighty about it.”
“Let the Socialists talk like that,” said Stuart-Orford furiously, his white moustaches standing out against a face gone suddenly red. “I tell you our party ought to have been prepared to ask every Briton, yes, every Briton from Court to slum, to give the shirt off his back rather than be beholden to such a creature.”
West felt sorry for the old man, his fierce pride, and his patriotism that could only see a little island leading the world. The new age was hard for the Stuart-Orfords. He tried to be comforting.
“Americans are God’s creatures, you know,” he said flippantly, “even if you do think the Almighty might have been better employed than in making such a continent. And we’ve got to live with them. The whole world is about as small as Britain was in Palmerston’s time. Communications, I mean, getting together. Of course America’s got most of the gold there is, more or less, and will soon have the rest, but after all, Colonel, it’s not the first time men like you have had to deal with the City chap who has bought the old park next to yours. You rope him in somehow, and that is what we have had to do with Oissel and his crowd.”
West left the old man muttering that even the Conservative youth was Socialist nowadays. It was useless to argue. Robert knew he spoke a different language from the Stuart-Orfords. The New York of jazz and dollars was, he felt, much nearer to him than Victorian sofa-cushions. But why would these old men whine like ladies in reduced circumstances, like genteel governesses always talking about the glories of the old families, and refuse to face the facts of the world they were living in? They hung on to the rope, jealous that the ship should sail on new adventures.
As he pushed through the swing door into the buzz and light of the central lobby, Sancroft, who had been talking with a group of fellow-journalists, hailed him. “Blackitt is wanting you. He’s out in the Strangers’ Lobby. I said I’d tell you.”
“I’ll see him at once.”
“Let me come too. If it’s all too private I’ll take the hint, but you promised I should be in on this, you know.”
“It depends on Blackitt, of course. I’d like to have you there. We must get some sort of a move on, or there’s going to be trouble. Houldsworth is getting his teeth in.”
“I know… and don’t neglect Madam Gracie too ostentatiously,” warned Sancroft, who had been on the Terrace earlier in the afternoon.
West collected Blackitt, and the three men went downstairs to the smoking-room, that large drab room with its tiled walls and leather benches that might have served as the model for the first-class railway waiting-room in any large British station. Crowded, full of smoke, it represented a familiar and snug haven to many M.P.s rather bewildered by the strange place to which their electors had sent them.
“It’s the best I can offer for a talk, Blackitt,” said West apologetically as he ordered drinks. “The Home Secretary is in his room, so we can’t talk there, and in this whole place there isn’t a quiet corner for a chat.”
But they were left alone in their corner by the window. Crowded on each other as they are, with no proper facilities for work or consultation, M.P.s out of desperation have evolved a certain technique of solitude. An earnestly talking group is usually left to itself.
Blackitt pulled at his pipe. Amid all this coming and going he found it hard to concentrate as easily as West and Sancroft, to whom it was the milieu in which all their work had to be done.
“We got over the first hurdle in the House to-day all right,” said West, “but the possibilities of trouble are there, and they may come from our own side as much as from the Opposition. Have you got any clues as to th
e burglars yet which will throw any light on Oissel’s death?”
“I’ve got bits, just bits and pieces, as I’ll tell you, Mr West. But they don’t fit together. I haven’t got the picture. And that’s where I want you to help me. I can’t go direct to the Home Secretary yet, but if you will give me something to go on I may be able to fit together enough to be worth taking to him. You know that anything you tell me will be safe enough, if it has to be dropped later.”
“I know that, so fire away.”
“Well, sir, we’ve got to get back to this dinner and the reasons behind it. The Home Secretary insists that it was just a personal affair, a little courtesy that would always be offered when negotiations of this kind were in progress—and that’s all right, of course, if it wasn’t that Oissel has never accepted a social engagement of any kind for the last ten years, his man tells me. Well, you must admit that it’s a bit of a coincidence that the very first time he breaks that rule he gets shot and his flat is burgled.”
“I can put you right as far as the Home Secretary is concerned. I had a talk with him this morning. The negotiations were at a very delicate stage. The Government wanted the loan rather more urgently than they are prepared to admit publicly. The terms were stiff, and included several objectionable provisos. I don’t know what those were. The Minister wouldn’t tell me, and of course I couldn’t have told you in any case. The Prime Minister was not certain whether Oissel himself really cared about these provisos or whether he was using them to force higher interest terms. The Home Secretary, who was only in the affair at all because he was an old friend of Oissel’s, took the chance of finding out what he could by a direct personal talk.”
“For the sake of his beautiful eyes, or for a bribe to be arranged?” asked Sancroft.
“You don’t expect he’d tell me that, do you?” asked West shortly. “And I can tell both of you this for a beginning. I’ve known the Home Secretary as intimately as anyone—probably know more about him than his own family. He can be as stupid as a mule, but he’s not the man to tackle any intricate dirty work. He’s as straight a man as there is in politics.”
“I’m always touched by the confidence in each other that politicians of the same party insist on displaying on State occasions, Bob,” said Sancroft teasingly, “but surely an appropriate application of whatever type of palm-oil Oissel preferred might be a positively patriotic duty in such circumstances.”
West shrugged his shoulders. “The Home Secretary is not likely to tell me what terms he was empowered to offer, and anyway I don’t see what that’s got to do with the mystery. I think we’re tackling this problem from the wrong end if we concentrate on what happened in Room J. I believe we’ve got to work from the flat.”
“Did Oissel have many visitors?” asked Sancroft.
“I’ve put a special man on to that. Very few and all well-known people—Lord Finsburgh of the Central Bank, Fishwick of the Treasury, Kinnaird, and one or two other big City men.”
“Perhaps Annette could help you there, Bob?”
West flushed. He did not like Sancroft’s teasing tone, nor was he particularly anxious for Blackitt to suspect any collaboration with Oissel’s granddaughter.
To turn the conversation he said to Blackitt: “But can’t Daubisq tell you anything? He has been with Mr Oissel for years.”
“He either cannot or will not. I can’t get much out of him. Mr Oissel couldn’t have chosen him for his intelligence.”
“Perhaps discretion was a more important quality,” said Sancroft with a grin. West remembered Annette’s attitude at tea. Oissel seemed to have infected every one round him with a rooted objection to telling anything to the police.
“Daubisq sticks to it, and there seems no reason to doubt his story, that he was chloroformed by the burglars as soon as he opened the door to them. We can get nothing more out of him than that, and the fact of Jenks having gone out to buy the sporting special to get the results of the Kid Oakley fight.”
“And the hall-porter, didn’t he suspect anything?”
“He didn’t know Oissel was out. Took up two well-dressed men in the lift. Didn’t suspect anything even when he heard what must have been the shot that killed Jenks. Thought it was a motor backfire. He got suspicious when the men came out in a great hurry without ringing for the lift, and so he fetched the police.”
“Of course, we musn’t rule out pure coincidence,” said West. “We kept the fact of the dinner out of the papers beforehand, but nothing that happens in this House can really be kept a secret. Ordinary thieves may have got the tip and have been out for money and valuables, so that the robbery would have nothing to do with the murder.”
“That won’t hold water for a moment, Mr West,” said Blackitt. “In one of the drawers that had been opened was a valuable diamond watch bracelet that Mr Oissel had bought as a gift for his granddaughter. The case had been opened, but the watch hadn’t been touched. There is no doubt, I think, that they were after papers of some kind, and that that is what they took. Both Daubisq and Miss Oissel agree that he never kept any kind of valuables or money in his rooms. They were always kept in the strong-room at the bank.”
“It’s a thousand pities those swine killed Jenks,” said Robert reflectively. “He was an exceptionally intelligent man, and must have got to know quite a lot about Oissel’s affairs. I know Oissel told the Minister that he’d been trying to persuade Jenks to go back with him to America. He might have formed some conclusions—about visitors, for example. You said that nothing was found on Jenks, no diary or anything that could help us, Blackitt?”
“Come over and have a look at what there is. Nothing that I can see—all personal stuff about boxing, date cards, and things like that… unless of course the figures in his notebook mean anything.”
“Notebook, Blackitt?” said Robert, looking up sharply. “Was there a notebook? You didn’t tell us that.”
Then, remembering his promise to Annette, he said more casually: “I’ll come over with you now and look at Jenks’ stuff.”
CHAPTER IX
As West walked across Palace Yard, and round to Scotland Yard, talking apparently casually to Inspector Blackitt, he had a feeling as though a mine were about to explode under his feet. He looked up for comfort to Big Ben, standing like a gigantic Guardsman against the clear blue sky. The clock-face looked so benevolently familiar that West tried to shake off the thought that so often came into his mind in these days—that this was all a façade, that the reality of Parliament was something quite different, that the real seat of Government had gone elsewhere, to Lombard Street or perhaps even across the Atlantic Ocean.
He said whimsically to Blackitt: “I find myself thinking of poor dead Oissel as a symbol—a jackal killed by a flick of the dying lion’s paw.”
Blackitt looked astonished. “A dying lion, sir?”
West laughed. “Only a fancy. I’m not offering you a new theory as to the murderer.”
Blackitt unlocked a cupboard in his bleak little room at the Yard, and put on the table one by one the articles that comprised what he called “the Jenks exhibit.” Pathetic, these odds and ends we leave behind us. West, who had many little acts of kindly thoughtfulness for which to thank the dead man, felt rather ashamed as he glanced at the well-worn wallet, a little packet of letters, some photographs and cards relating to sports events.
Finally Blackitt placed on the table a small black notebook, with a worn leather cover.
West felt his heart miss a beat. He picked up the book. Inside there were figures jotted down apparently haphazardly, some words that seemed like code words in black letters, and odd hieroglyphics. It corresponded in every detail with Annette’s careful description of the notebook which she had declared was the real object of the burglary.
Then what was it doing in the pocket of Edward Jenks, the man specially sent by the Home Secretary to be guardian angel to Oiss
el and everything he owned?
Could the Home Secretary conceivably have had anything to do with it? The room seemed to turn round him. Robert kept his eyes fixed on a page of the book to hide his utter bewilderment. Of course the Home Secretary could know nothing… but what did it mean? Robert was glad he had checked his exclamation of surprise, which would have roused the suspicions of Blackitt. He must see his way clearer through this mystery before he could trust even the Inspector, who, after all, was the servant of Scotland Yard and not of the Ministry.
Annette must see the book to identify it positively. But how could he manage to get possession of it in order to show it to her, without explaining its importance to Blackitt, who would certainly not allow it to be taken from his room without very good reason.
“If we could puzzle this out, Blackitt, it might tell us something of what we want to know,” Robert said slowly, feeling his ground.
Blackitt took the book and turned over the pages. “Do you think so? It looks to me as though Jenks had jotted down notes of his bets, and perhaps notes on form, in some code of his own.”
“But it might be more important than that. Jenks might have been making notes of his experiences with Oissel. You know what a chap he was for telling good yarns. I’d often told him he ought to write his reminiscences some day.”
West invented this story on the spot, but it seemed to interest Blackitt. After all, West knew Jenks much better than he did.
“There may be something in that, sir. I’ll put our cipher men on to it at once. They can puzzle out anything that’s got any meaning to it at all.”
This was the very last thing West wanted.
“Yes, of course,” he said slowly, “that would be a good thing to do. But… er… you know, Blackitt, there are so many delicate issues involved. Look here, I used to be a whale at deciphering codes. It was the only thing I ever worked at in school.” West began to fancy himself as a ready liar. “Let me have this book for a night. I might be able to do something with it, and it would be wiser not to bring in any official, however trustworthy, at the moment.”
The Division Bell Mystery Page 8