The Division Bell Mystery

by Ellen Wilkinson

  His meditations were interrupted by the arrival of a messenger with a card, and an intimation that the Chief had given orders that Inspector Blackitt should see this visitor when he came back after the inquest. The card was a professional one of good quality on which was engraved “John Bowes, Photographer.” The address given was Duke Street, St James’s.

  The Inspector glanced with no special interest at the little man who was shown into the room. He was very thin. His clothes were carelessly worn but of good quality. His head was the head of a scholar, bald and with a fine forehead.

  “Good morning, Mr Bowes. You wanted to see me?”

  “No, not you particularly. I asked to see the official in charge of the Oissel murder case, and I was told to wait for you.”

  Inspector Blackitt’s face took on a keener expression. “I am very glad you did, if you have anything to tell me. The case has been put in my hands. You are a photographer, I see from your card, Mr Bowes.”

  “That is so,” replied the other in a strong Scots accent. “That is to say, I do not take photographs of people—mine is specialist work, mostly connected with museums. I photograph old documents. I have photographed a document recently that may be of interest to you.”

  “Indeed, Mr Bowes.” Blackitt kept his ‘poker face,’ but his interest increased considerably.

  “Do you recognize these?” John Bowes put on the table about a dozen large-size photographs.

  Blackitt looked at these carefully. “Yes, I think I do. Where did you get them?” he asked in surprise.

  The little man smiled. “So you have got as far as that?”

  “Oh, yes, we have got that far. Now will you tell me how you came by these. You did the photographic copy, I suppose?”

  “Yes. I took the photographs myself.”

  “And whom did you photograph them for?”

  “That is what I have come to see. Last week a man came to see me to ask me if I could photograph certain documents in a hurry. He arranged to come with them on Monday night at eight-thirty. He could only stay half an hour, he said. They must be done in that time.”

  “Didn’t you suspect there was something wrong about that? It must have seemed a little unusual.”

  Mr Bowes shrugged his shoulders. “Many things happen in London which are somewhat unusual. That was not my affair.”

  “And he came as arranged?”

  “He came, and I took the photographs. He paid me in advance, and promised to call for the proofs the next day.”

  “And did he call?” There was an eager edge to Blackitt’s voice.

  “He has never called, Inspector.”

  “You could describe him to me?”

  “There is no need. This is the man,” and John Bowes placed on the table a cutting of a photograph from a daily paper. It was the picture of Edward Jenks!

  “To-day is Thursday, Mr Bowes. You have taken rather a long time in bringing this to our notice. Of course, we are very grateful, but may I ask why you did not come to the police on Tuesday?”

  “I am a busy man, Inspector. I do not read the daily papers. I am not interested. It is purely by accident that I saw this photograph.”

  “Just one more question. This document, as you call it—could you describe it?”

  “It was just a plain ring-leaved notebook, bound in black leather. It seemed to have been much used. It was rather worn.”

  “You couldn’t have photographed all the pages in it in that time.”

  “I photographed all the pages on which anything was written.”

  “Did Mr Jenks say anything to you about the book? Did he make any explanation of his somewhat strange request?”

  “No, and I did not ask him. It was not my affair.”

  “But, really, Mr Bowes,” protested the police officer, somewhat scandalized, “surely you must have realized that you were being asked to do something which might possibly be part of criminal proceedings. In fact, that is quite likely what you were doing.” The Inspector’s voice was stern.

  The little Scotsman remained quite unimpressed. “It is no part of my duty to ask questions of my clients. He asked for a perfectly feasible job to be done in a hurry. I did it. He paid me. There the matter ends as far as I am concerned.”

  “But it does not end there, Mr Bowes, if respectable citizens will not realize their duty to the police in such matters…”

  Mr Bowes rose and smiled a broad Scots smile. “The police have had no reason yet to complain of my conduct. I need not have come to see you at all. I could have put the prints in the fire, and that would have ended my part in the affair.”

  Blackitt began to feel that he was being tactless. In the rather elephantine manner of the British police force he tried to be amiable as he handed his visitor over to a messenger to be conveyed to the front door, but a whole leading article in the Weekly Scotsman on English police methods was expressed by the set of John Bowes’ shoulders as he solemnly took his leave.

  After his visitor had gone Blackitt sat for some time at his desk looking at the photographs. He compared them carefully with the pages of the notebook. There was no doubt these were the originals. What was the explanation? Why should Jenks take his own notebook to be photographed? Was he anticipating trouble and so in need of evidence of some kind? Blackitt had not been told of the information given to West by Annette. He did not know that the book belonged to Oissel. But he felt that West had realized its importance and probably knew something about it. Had West managed to decipher any of the coded words? He had simply returned the book that morning with a scribbled note: “See you about this later.” Obviously, therefore, Blackitt thought to himself, he could do nothing further until he had seen West and found out what he knew about the book.

  He strolled over to the House of Commons hoping that he would not have to wait an hour while his card travelled round the building in search of West. He found poor Robert soon enough, for the unfortunate youth was in the centre of the Strangers’ Lobby surrounded by massive and determined-looking ladies. The policeman on duty at the door, an old friend of Blackitt’s, explained with a grin that the Home Secretary’s League of Women Voters had arrived en masse to be shown round and given tea. The Minister had escaped after assuring them how glad he was to see them, how delighted Mr West would be to show them everything, and how terribly disappointed he was that a Cabinet meeting prevented him from having that great joy himself.

  West looked desperately at Blackitt from a heaving sea of printed voiles. He escaped for a second to explain.

  “Let me tell ’em you’re wanted for murder,” suggested Blackitt helpfully and with a broad grin.

  “If you were the hangman himself, they would insist on being shown round first. They’ve saved up for this trip, Blackitt, and they will have their money’s worth.”

  “How long?” asked Blackitt.

  “Can’t do ’em under two hours, and I have to see the Minister at six.”

  “I must see you before you see him. I must see you now. Can’t you get anyone else to do this job?”

  “Is it likely? Every M.P. has his own troubles. I’ll manage five o’clock somehow. Meet you in the upstairs bar.—Yes, ladies, this is called the Strangers’ Lobby, but of course you are not strangers now, you are voters… When the suffragettes…”

  Blackitt fled from the old, old story and took refuge in that quiet bar where those who have to be in the House but not of it can secure peace from the restless crowds of the lobbies.

  “Hope you haven’t pushed them in the river,” said Blackitt when West joined him punctually at five.

  “Told them an horrific tale about a crisis, and left them having tea in charge of all the waiters in sight. I have told the head waiter to give ’em all they want and send the bill to the Home Secretary. Serve him right. Now, what’s new?”

  Blackitt told the story
of John Bowes. West felt very glad that he had not committed himself more in the note with which he had returned the notebook that morning. He could now confide in Blackitt without appearing to have been holding anything back from him. He told Blackitt frankly that he had shown the book to Miss Oissel, and that she had identified it as the key document for which the unknown burglars were undoubtedly searching.

  The two men looked at each other. “Then what was Ted Jenks doing with it?” asked the Inspector.

  West lit a cigarette, and watched the match slowly burn away. “I think, Blackitt,” he said, “that we have given Jenks the benefit of our friendly doubts long enough. He is found dead with the notebook in his possession. We tried to explain that away. He might conceivably have been trying to hide it from the thieves and died in defence of it, though we could not see how. Now we know he left Oissel’s flat and had some pages of the book secretly photographed. Well, that information, even if he could have decoded it, is of no use to him. Was he getting hold of it for some one else? It looks like it. Now we have to consider who.”

  Blackitt scraped out his pipe. “I suppose we can rule out the possibility that he was having the pages photographed for Mr Oissel, and by his instructions.”

  “I suggested to Miss Oissel that her grandfather might have given Jenks the book for safe-keeping, but she squashed that idea emphatically. It’s even less likely that Oissel would have gone to all that trouble to have his own property photographed, and anyway why should that be done on the one evening when he breaks his usual rule and leaves his rooms for dinner?”

  “Then we’ve got to consider who wanted the information. It must be a limited list. Don’t you think the Home Secretary could help us there? He was in the midst of negotiations. He would know if there was anyone else operating on the job, who could be considered the rival of the Oissel group.”

  West glanced at his wrist-watch. “I’ve an appointment with him at six, and I’d already decided to tell him what we suspect about Jenks. It will be a blow to him, you know, because it will look as though he’d not been playing straight when he sent Jenks to Oissel. Of course, anyone who knows the circumstances would see that was out of the question. Jenks went with the full knowledge of Sir George Gleeson. Still, it might look a bit awkward in Parliament if that comes out.”

  “As come out it will.”

  “Of course, but everything depends on how it’s done. Nothing gives the other side such a chance in politics as looking as though you were having facts dragged out of you. The best way to keep a political secret is to take a large hall and call a meeting to make a speech about it. Then no one takes any notice.”

  Blackitt grinned. “I’ve never wanted to be a politician, Mr West, but after my experience this week I’d rather be sentenced to penal servitude than to Westminster.”

  “Oh, come,” said West, looking round the oak-panelled bar. “You must admit we do ourselves pretty comfortably. Besides which we see to it that the restrictions that apply to every other pub don’t apply here. It all helps to make life bearable, you know.”

  “Oh, the quarters are comfortable enough, but what I can’t understand about M.P.s is why, when they have gone to such a lot of trouble to get themselves elected to such a good club, they can’t settle down and enjoy it. They no sooner get here than they try to upset everything in order that they may have the trouble of an election again, when all that ordinary folk want to do is to settle down to their own business and leave the politicians to mind theirs. Silly, I call it.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, Blackitt. But that’s politics.”

  As it was not quite six when West left the Inspector, he thought he would glance in at the debate in the House and see what was on. Few rising politicians care to be seen much in the debating chamber except during the high spots of a full-dress debate, or when they are themselves trying to catch the Speaker’s eye. There is an assumption that men who are in the chamber merely to listen to arguments are there because they have nothing better to do.

  Robert stood for a few moments at the Bar of the House, that narrow piece of leather sewn across the green matting on the floor which separates the ‘precincts of the House’—that part where a Member is under the Speaker’s eye, and may rise to speak, or otherwise must sit down and be reasonably quiet—from that part where Members, although actually in the debating chamber, can stand about and talk in audible voices, and generally act as though there were no debate in progress at all.

  This debate was very sparsely attended. One of those hardy annuals, a land drainage bill, was dragging its way wearily through a desultory second reading discussion. Robert was just turning to leave the chamber when he was joined by Michael Houldsworth.

  “So you’ve put Grace Richards on to call me off.”

  “Did she tell you so?”

  “Is it likely?”

  “I congratulate you on your acumen, then.”

  “Hardly needed, are they—the congratulations, I mean?”

  “And you’ve promised her?”

  “Naturally. But what are you trying to hide, West? Don’t you, or, rather, doesn’t your Minister see that things are drifting to a crisis over this Oissel affair? I sometimes wonder whether British Cabinet Ministers ever trouble to read the financial columns of a daily paper. If they do, they act as though anything but the leader page was beneath their august notice.”

  “Well, in the light of the financial columns do you suggest that your adjournment debate would have done any good at the present time?”

  Houldsworth slightly elevated one shoulder as a reply. “Grace can call me off, but she has no influence with the Scots. They have taken over the job for Monday. You had better get your Minister primed with some yarn by then that will hang together. Are you really on the track of a solution? Grace hinted that you were, but I assumed that had been provided as a little bit of sugar for the bird.”

  West glanced at the lined face of the man beside him. Young though he was, Houldsworth was not new to the Parliamentary game. He knew every move. West would have liked to talk over the problem with him, but of course that was impossible. Houldsworth was not even an orthodox member of his own party, but was running a semi-Communist show of his own. It was his lack of allegiance to any party that made him so dangerous a foe. All parties in the British House of Commons are more or less pledged to keep the show running somehow. There is always a bond of union somewhere at the bottom which gets the Mother of Parliaments out of the worst of her family squabbles. But Houldsworth was of the type that rejoiced in giving the venerable old lady a black eye whenever an opportunity offered. Nor was he at all likely to be influenced by the flattery of being taken into Ministerial confidence, that subtlest of all methods of dealing with the really dangerous back-bencher.

  West decided it would be wisest to be amiable.

  “I’m seeing the Home Secretary at six. I’ll tell him what you say.”

  “Why trouble? It won’t be he who decides what he’ll say. Better tell Gleeson. What is he thinking about it all?”

  “That I don’t know. Must get along now.” As Robert turned on his heel and left the chamber he realized that that was just the simple truth. He hadn’t the remotest idea what Sir George Gleeson was thinking. Ought he to go to him with what he already knew? No. Better to have it all out first with the Home Secretary, even if it did mean upsetting him by having to tell him of what looked like the disloyalty of his hitherto faithful Jenks.

  CHAPTER XII

  The Home Secretary was not in his room when Robert went along there. The Cabinet meeting was evidently not yet over, for the Home Secretary prided himself on his strict punctuality in keeping appointments. He had all the drearier virtues of a public man. Robert remembered that he had promised the Minister to read for him a confidential report that had been prepared by the inspectorate on the conditions in female prisons. He looked among the papers on the Minister’s
desk, but it was not there.

  He proceeded to hunt through the drawers, all of which were kept in miraculous tidiness by the Minister himself. Robert was firmly of the opinion that tidiness in anyone above the rank of a typist was the sign of an inferior mind, but the Minister hated having his papers tidied by secretaries, though he had no objection to Robert’s ministrations. It said much for West’s dogged loyalty to his Chief that he spent hours tidying papers for the Home Secretary simply in order to put the Minister in the position of having to read papers because he had no excuse for doing anything else.

  While he was going through his Chief’s private drawer in search of the missing report he came across an envelope file marked “Cabinet Papers. Secret.” As any scrap of paper that goes before a Cabinet meeting, even the most routine report, is always marked “Secret” Robert had no hesitation in opening the file. That the Minister gave him the right to do this was one of the reasons for Sir George Gleeson’s coldness to West. Sir George was a stickler for the convention of Cabinet secrecy even to the careful destruction of the blotting-paper after a meeting.

  As he was carelessly turning over the papers, which did not seem to include the report for which he was looking, Robert’s heart gave a sudden leap. He picked up three sheets of House of Commons notepaper, held together by a paper-clip. He took them to the window to examine them more closely. There was no doubt about it. Accurately copied on to those sheets were the list of figures, code-words in block letters, and hieroglyphics over which he had puzzled for hours the previous night. They could only have been copied from the Oissel notebook, and they had been copied by the Home Secretary himself. Robert knew his hand so well. He looked at the notes at the side, also in the Minister’s handwriting. They were evidently a rough translation of the coded words, and they related to the loan negotiations. Here was the very information which would have been invaluable to the British Government had they been in possession of it during their negotiations with Oissel.