The Division Bell Mystery

by Ellen Wilkinson

  Robert replaced the papers in the file, put them tidily in the drawer, and went slowly back to the window. His brain would hardly form the words: “What does this mean?” But what did it mean? When had the Home Secretary made that copy? How had he got hold of the notebook? Of course, if he had seen it after Oissel’s death, that was a reasonable explanation. But he knew the code—the code that Annette herself did not know, and surely the old man, so secretive about everything, would have cherished the secret of his private code beyond all else. Yet the Home Secretary knew it… and he was no expert. Had he had the Home Office experts on it? But if he had, Blackitt would certainly have known about that.

  And then Jenks—but no, Robert felt he couldn’t see the Home Secretary just now. He must have time to think. He was gazing gloomily at the view across Palace Yard when the door opened. Robert turned with a start. “Thank God,” he said to himself when he saw that it was not the Home Secretary. It was only the Minister’s Civil Service secretary, a pleasant lad with a cheerful ‘I should worry’ air which usually amused Robert. His name was Bertram Briggs.

  “The Cabinet meeting is going on for ages yet,” he announced casually. “Mortimer has just phoned through. Chief says don’t bother to wait. He’ll see you after dinner.”

  He caught sight of Robert’s face as he walked to the desk. “Good Lord, West, are you ill? You look ghastly. Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thanks. I’m all right. Been overdoing it, I suppose, and this hot weather. I think I’ll go on the Terrace and get some fresh air.”

  “You’re helping on the Oissel case, aren’t you?” asked Briggs, seating himself on the edge of the desk, and swinging a leg.

  “I seem to have tumbled in on it, but I expect you know as much about it as I do.” Robert said this casually, but he kept an eye on Briggs to see how he took it. Did he by any chance know anything about the Oissel notebook?

  “Not me,” said Briggs. “You know what the Chief is like, close as an oyster. You are a favourite, and doesn’t that make our Gleeson mad! He’s got it in for you all right. Wonder what would happen if you blossomed out as Home Secretary before he retired. Queer thing about politics nowadays, anybody can become anything.”

  “Thanks, but you might have Houldsworth some day.”

  “Wouldn’t make much difference, Communist or Conservative—the Gleesons run the show. If they are old hands at politics the Ministers don’t want to be bothered and leave it to us. If they are new, their inferiority complex won’t let them contradict us, so the good old Civil Service lets the puppets play.”

  “There might be a revolution some day, you know.”

  “What difference would that make, except that the revolutionaries wouldn’t dare to cut our salaries? They would have to pay us twice as much and implore us to go on doing whatever we were doing.”

  West snorted! “Damn you, Briggs, and damn your smug complacent Civil Service!”

  “It isn’t smug. It merely goes on doing the job. You politicians think you can improvise government like jazz on a piano, and that if you say a thing in your speeches it will happen of itself. Can’t be done. Blessed are the forms and the questionnaires, to the umpteenth million of them.”

  “I’ll go and get that drink,” said Robert gloomily, and banged the door behind him.

  Robert went back to the Terrace to try to think out the implications of his new discovery. A faint mist was rising from the river. The tea-time guests had gone. Only a few determined souls were marching up and down the long flagged pavement in their endeavours to keep down the dreaded weight. Everything was quiet and cool. Westminster Bridge looked solidly reassuring, bearing proudly her never-ceasing traffic. Lambeth Palace with its Saxon stones seemed to murmur its comforting message:

  “And as things have been they remain.”

  Robert, as he leaned over the parapet and gazed down on the swelling waters of the rising tide, was not so sure. The foundations of his faith in human nature were crumbling. Like other young politicians of his period, Robert West never gave religion a thought unless it happened to come up as a political question, some organization wanting money for schools, another church wanting a bill to stop somebody doing something or other. Trained in the conventions of a public school, with its compulsory chapels, Robert had simply absorbed the one guiding principle for his moral life, that there were certain things that certain people did not do. Not all conventions held true for everybody, but a man must stick to what held true for his type. A Cabinet Minister could not do things that might be overlooked in a back-bencher.

  What had the Home Secretary been doing? Could it be he who was the moving spirit behind the mysterious murder of Georges Oissel in Room J and the burglary at Oissel’s flat, in which Jenks had been shot. There were many missing pieces in this dreadful jigsaw, but would the hand of his own Chief appear in the complete picture?

  Should he phone Blackitt to come over for another talk? Instinctively Robert reacted against that. Blackitt was a friendly ally now, but he would have to do his duty, Minister or not.

  Should he go in search of Sancroft and talk it over with him? Sancroft was a loyal soul whose discretion could be trusted, but he had an independent mind. His job as a lobby journalist was to jump to conclusions and stick to them. West wanted to talk round the problem and arrive at no conclusion just yet. He was afraid of possible conclusions, especially the one at which the irreverent Sancroft was certain to jump.

  Don was the man. They would dine together at the same table again as they had dined on the night of the murder and talk the whole thing out.

  When he had telephoned for Shaw, who promised to come over at once, West returned to his restless pacing up and down the Terrace, which was filling now with guests for dinner. He managed to avoid being roped into a party to meet Rosaleen Ray, the new cinema star, who was holding a little court at the Peers’ end of the Terrace, and to escape having to fill in at a Colonial Office party to some lawyers and educationists from West Africa.

  “It’s no use, Rory,” he protested to the energetic Under-Secretary who was determined that he should come and be polite to “his coloured fellow-subjects.” “I know I ought to come and be amiable, but I never know what to say to people from the Empire except ‘It’s a good old Empire, isn’t it?’ And so often they don’t think it is. They are sure to feel they are oppressed or that we aren’t doing our duty by ’em, and then it gets so awkward. I don’t know a thing about exchanging needles for cocoa-beans, so do count me out.”

  Robert was pointed out to a good many people as he walked up and down waiting for Shaw, unable to settle down to do anything else. The Oissel case was still the main topic of conversation. So far people were being good-humoured about it, and rather resentful of the fuss the Americans were making. The Americans ought to understand that the police were doing their best. But Robert knew, and the Government knew, that this mood would last only over the week-end. Then a debate would be forced, a statement would have to be made, world publicity. Robert groaned at the thought. But that the Home Secretary, rigid, domineering, conventional, should be mixed up in the shady side of such a show—this Robert found himself unable to believe, but he felt more curious about his Chief than he had been in all the years he had known him. He had taken him as much for granted since his boyhood as he did the statue of Queen Victoria in the square at home. Was the human statue a façade hiding something exceedingly queer?

  The lights began to be lit in the Terrace dining-rooms. The hour before dinner on a June night on the Terrace is one of the compensations of an M.P.’s life. No constituents have to be lived up to impressively. It is the time for chosen friends and intimate little parties. Robert, standing with his back to the wall of the Speaker’s house, which closes one end of the Terrace, looked down the quarter-mile of flagged walk. The over-ornamented Gothic walls were softened in the twilight. The river had gathered a rich blue from the sunset
sky. M.P.s came out for a breath of air. Guests began to arrive. There were several dinner-parties being given. Débutantes in long dresses whose velvets and lace swept the old stones gave colour. The rough tweed coats of the miners’ M.P.s added a touch of homeliness. It was all so mixed, so English, and so essentially friendly.

  Only the windows of Room J remained dark. No party had been given there since the night of the murder. To Robert, miserably conscious of his secret, that darkened room seemed a symbol of the rot under this gay surface life. Things in England were not what they had been when this place was built and Victoria opened it. He felt how little he knew of the world outside his island, and of the great forces that were sweeping into his guarded world. Russia and America, titans of the East and West… and between them the England of tradition, of the old ways, of the splendid past… But if those traditions did not hold good… if there were breaches in the dyke?

  Not for the first time did Robert West rage angrily against that public-school education which had given him no clue to this new world. Some of the Labour men, the younger ones, seemed to know what was happening. But was he so very different from the Stuart-Orfords, looking back to a world that had gone, to traditions that seemed to be breaking?

  His reverie was interrupted by the arrival of Don Shaw’s card. He decided not to take Shaw to the Harcourt room after all. They would dine amid the cheerful racket of the Strangers’ Dining-room, the shabby, crowded, smoke-laden room where M.P.s can entertain their guests with the cheapest meal in the West End. “I’m not being mean, Don,” said Robert as he explained this. “But I want to seem cheerful while I can.”

  “Get it all off your chest,” Shaw drawled in his soothing voice. “I won’t interrupt.”

  Very rapidly, letting his food grow cold on his plate unheeded, Robert told the whole story as he knew it. Shaw gave no sign of surprise. When he had finished Bob said rather impatiently: “Well?”

  “You seem determined to think the worst of your Chief,” was all Don said.

  “But, Don, hang it all, that’s just what I don’t want to do, but what other explanation is there?”

  “I suppose I have a contrary mind, Bob, so let’s go over the points, and I’ll try to put a possible case for your Minister.”

  “Good. That’s what I’d hoped you’d do. Well, let’s begin with the first point. Jenks, the Home Secretary’s man, despite all official regulations is lent directly by him to Oissel.”

  “That’s easy. It was done, you say, to soothe Oissel, who was in no doubt as to Jenks’ confidential relation to the Home Secretary. Sir George Gleeson also knew, and had at least sanctioned the innovation, even if he didn’t approve it.”

  “Right,” said Bob. “Now the next point. Jenks knows which is the key document, and steals it to have it copied.”

  “You have no evidence at all that it was being copied for the Home Secretary. In fact, quite the contrary, since he has apparently been able to obtain copies elsewhere. That leaves two questions to be settled—who was Jenks operating for, and where did your Chief get his copy?”

  Robert made a note of these two points on the back of an envelope. “We’ll come back to those,” he said, “but you must admit that it looks queer if Jenks gets the only opportunity he could have had to get the pages copied when the Home Secretary had managed for the first time to get Oissel to break his rule about dining out.”

  “It certainly gave Jenks his opportunity,” said Shaw, helping himself to more potatoes, “but that does not necessarily mean that the Home Secretary deliberately provided it, any more than you did. If Jenks was doing this for some rival group it might have been just a piece of buckshee luck for him.”

  “And then the next point—Oissel is murdered, his flat raided, and Jenks killed on his return from getting the memo-book photographed. Where does that fit in?”

  “Well, it doesn’t fit into your theory about the Home Secretary. At least, he would be doing things in a wholesale fashion if it did. I come back to my original theory there, Bob, that some other group is operating. Surely you can get information about that.”

  West shrugged his shoulders. “These big Government loans are carried through so few channels, and in this case the other channels don’t seem to have been in the least interested,” he said. “I managed to get from Mortimer, the Prime Minister’s secretary, that the only other possible group had been tried and simply would not come in. That’s absolutely confidential, of course. It would make things look worse for British credit if it came out.”

  “Then we are left with the fifth and last point,” answered Don. “Your finding a copy of some of the pages of the memo-book among the Home Secretary’s papers, and in his handwriting. Now where did he get them from? Has he been in possession of the book since it was found on Jenks?”

  “It’s been locked in Blackitt’s cupboard all that time. I know that.”

  “But you had it out for a night—why shouldn’t he?”

  “I’m sure Blackitt would have told me if the Minister had borrowed it.”

  “Could any other official have got it for the Minister if he specially asked for it? Is there any way you could find that out?”

  “I could phone Blackitt. I think I could put it to him quite casually. I’ll just go along and do it now.”

  West was not absent long. When he returned it was with the information that the Home Secretary had asked to look at whatever papers had been found on Jenks. They had been sent to him, and he had returned them in about an hour’s time with a note of condolence written in his own hand to old Mrs Jenks, and two five-pound notes to be included when the Home Office sent to her the money that had been found in the wallet. “A perfectly natural thing for him to do, of course, so Blackitt did not mention it to me. It’s evident he doesn’t think anything of it. But he is emphatic that no Home Office experts have been called in to decode the cipher.”

  “The queer thing to me,” said Don thoughtfully, “is why the Home Secretary should return that notebook when he knew of its importance. Surely he could have kept it in special custody himself if he had wanted, couldn’t he?”

  “Yes, of course. Especially if he’d had a word with Gleeson. Now why did he send it back and say nothing?”

  “Don’t you think you’d better see your Minister, and discuss the whole thing with him?” asked Shaw. “There may be a perfectly simple explanation of what looks queer on the surface. In fact, it may be so simple that he himself doesn’t see how bad it would look if it came out to the public more or less as it has come to you. If Houldsworth and the Scots Members are on this they may ferret out something of what you have discovered. Fancy all this coming out in Parliament without the Minister realizing the sort of construction that could be put on it!”

  “Yes, of course, I must see him,” answered West, “but will he discuss it with me? He’s damnably touchy if he thinks I’m questioning anything he has done, though he stands more from me than anyone connected with this place. I don’t suppose he’ll even listen to me.”

  “Then you’ll have to go to some one who will make him listen,” said Shaw impatiently. He was growing a little tired of the attitude which both West and Blackitt adopted as a matter of course, that there was something sacred about a Minister of the Crown, and that the vagaries of a rather bad-tempered elderly gentleman must be treated as matters of real importance.

  “I’ll see him first thing to-morrow morning,” said Robert, “and if Gleeson is with him I’ll sit on the doorstep and refuse to be kicked off it. If he’s going down to his place at Esher for the week-end I’ll travel on the running-board of his car if necessary and shout at him through the window. I can’t do more than that.”

  Shaw looked with affection at the handsome head of his friend. “I don’t suppose those hectic measures will be really necessary, but get hold of him and make him listen you must. He seems to me to be calmly sitting on a powde
r-barrel that may go up at any moment.”

  “It will take a lot of other things with it, if it does. Lord, what a life, and some folks think that the House of Commons is a peaceful refuge for the aged and infirm! Irak will seem comparatively tame after this, won’t it, Don?”

  CHAPTER XIII

  After Shaw had gone, and as the House was still sitting, West allowed himself to be roped into the fag-end of a party of Murray Grey’s which had already been going on for some time in the dining-room next to Room J. Kinnaird was there and waved to him from the other end of the table as he came in. Robert was not feeling particularly convivial, but he was in the mood for drink, and lots of it. He finished the remaining half of a bottle of champagne, and went on to drink steadily what was put before him. The bells rang for the rising of the House, but the party took no notice. It was midnight before the head waiter was able to impress upon the host that his party were positively the last people in the building.

  As they went along the corridor the waiters were extinguishing lights behind them. By the time they got out into Palace Yard the remainder of the staff came hurrying by. West lingered for a while by his host’s car talking rather vaguely about the business of the day.

  Suddenly, as Murray Grey drove away, and West was crossing the Yard, he remembered that he had left his attaché-case in the room where the party had been. To his horror he realized that all the careful notes he had been taking about the Oissel murder were in it. To leave it lying about was impossible even though every one had gone. The one idea in his drink-fuddled brain was that he must retrieve that case at any cost.

  With a word to the policeman at the entrance he hurried back into the House, up the stairs, and into the central lobby. There is no place so eerie as the House of Commons when every one has gone. Within half an hour of its pulsating with life and movement it will be deserted, the only lights in the long corridors being the firemen’s lanterns on the floor, which make deeper the shadows on the high walls. He felt his way down the stairs to the swing doors which lead to the Harcourt corridor. There was a faint light from the river, then impenetrable darkness. Robert couldn’t remember where the switches were, but he thought he could grope his way to Room H, where Murray Grey’s party had been held. He wondered if the policeman was kept on duty in Room J all night. Gleeson’s orders had been definite that it must not be left, but perhaps with doors locked and the police on guard at the outside entrance that had been considered sufficient.