On Monday morning, when Paula arrived at the Rayhome offices, she was surprised to find the door locked. Repeated ringing of the bell eventually produced the lady from the basement, who doubled the jobs of concierge and cleaning woman.
She said, “It’s no good ringing. They’ve gone.”
“Gone?”
“That’s right.”
“Where?”
“How’d I know? You work he“I thought so,” said Paula.
“They paid up the rent and cleared out Friday evening. Gave me a month’s pay for notice. What about you?”
Paula reflected. She was paid monthly, in advance, and it was only halfway through the month. Looked at from that point of view, she had two weeks’ pay in hand. All the same, they might have said something.
“Didn’t they give any reason for clearing out?”
“Not to me, they didn’t,” said the lady. “I’ve spoken to the agents. They’ll soon have the board up. We’ll get someone else, easy enough. You leave your address with me, love. Then, if the new lot want someone to help in the office, I’ll pass it on.”
“Well, ta,” said Paula.
During the first few weeks that she worked for Holmes and Holmes, Susan began to appreciate why top secretaries earned top salaries. It was no nine-to-six job. She was expected to be available whenever Andrew Holmes had to entertain important clients to drinks or dinner. On one occasion she had been landed with the wives of three American tycoons and told to look after them whilst Andrew spent the evening talking business with their husbands. In desperation she had taken them to the Palladium, where Tommy Steele was at the top of the bill. They had occupied a stage box and enjoyed themselves thoroughly.
It was not only the long hours. It was the fact that she had to keep her wits about her all the time. She had to have a mental picture of how Andrew planned to spend his day. What could be squeezed into it and what could not. And, occasionally, what was so important that someone, less important, had to be squeezed out—and how to do it without giving offence.
On a rainy evening in the third week of October, she had been allowed home, for once, in good time. A solid lunch at the Savoy had taken the edge off her appetite. She boiled herself an egg, made some toast and coffee and settled down in front of the fire.
Under the light of the single table lamp, which emphasised the vertical lines on her face, she looked not only tired, but fine-drawn—as though she had been working towards a goal which was in sight, but still beyond her reach.
She was almost asleep when the telephone rang.
She said, “Hullo.” And then, with a marked lack of enthusiasm, “Oh, it’s you, is it.”
“It’s me,” said David. “And I’m in trouble.”
“You’re always in trouble.”
“You don’t understand. For the last six weeks—I can’t describe it—”
“I’m sure you can if you try,” said Susan coolly. Her hand went out to the switch under the telephone table.
“I’ve been living like an animal.” David was speaking slowly, dragging out the words as though he, too, was tired to death.
“A lot of animals I know of seem to live very comfortably.”
“In casual wards. Sleeping rough. In holes and corners. My clothes rotting on my back.”
“Truly? Or are you making it all up?”
“No fooling, love. I’m a sight for sore eyes. Holes in everything. It’s not right, in weather like this.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Want? I want you to give me some money for a start. You can spare it.”
“How much?”
David seemed to be thinking.
He said, “Ten pounds. That would do me. For a start.”
“I’m not exactly rolling in money right now. I’ve just had to pay the rent and rates. Both of them up.”
“Five pounds, then. Four. Even three would help.”
There was a clear note of desperation in his voice.
Susan said, “Well, I might—”
“You’ve never starved, have you? Weeks without proper food. Cold and wet all the time.”
“I’ve never starved,” agreed Susan.
“I’m finished if you don’t.”
Susan seemed to relax. She said, “All right, David. If you’re finished, I’ll have to see what I can do. Where do you want the money sent?”
“Send it to the Rayhome office,” said David. He, too, seemed to be happier. “I’ll pick it up there. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” said Susan softly.
She put back the receiver, extracted the tape recorder from under the table, set the speed to slow and took down the conversation, word for word, in shorthand. Then she transcribed it into longhand and read it over to herself. It seemed to cause her some satisfaction. Her face had lost its drawn look and was almost serene.
On the following afternoon, in a burst of fine mid-October weather, Chief Superintendent Morrissey called on Arthur Abel at New Scotland Yard. He found A. A. looking cheerful. His table was covered with dockets and loose papers, and there were files on another table behind him, and more on the floor beside him. Abel said, “I think we’re getting somewhere. You know, I’ve always realised that the key to this whole business was the one hundred thousand pounds that Arnie Wiseman lent Blackett so that Blackett could buy the remaining seventy per cent interest in the Blackbird Property Company from Harry Woolf and his wife, so I’ve been concentrating on that.”
He cleared a little space on the table, spread a fresh sheet of paper on it and drew a diagram.
“This is how it went. Argon, remember, already held Blackett’s thirty per cent of Blackbird.” He drew two squares and joined them to a third with a green arrow. “Blackett now gets hold of the remaining seventy per cent and transfers it to Argon.” A second green arrow. “You see what that produces?”
“Three squares and two arrows.”
“It means that Blackbird became a wholly owned subsidiary of Argon. And that means that it could declare a group dividend.”
“So what?”
“So all the money in Blackbird, which was a wealthy company already and became a lot wealthier as its properties were sold off, could go into Argon free of tax.” Two more arrows, this time in red. “Right. So Argon now has a great deal of money. Now watch this. Here comes Arnie.”
“In that yellow circle?”
“That’s him. He doesn’t take any of the actual shares in Argon, note. But he becomes a director. Along with Blackett and that army chum of Blackett’s, Colonel Paterson. And he starts to milk the company. In the first year he was modest. Comparatively. He had a salary of five thousand pounds and an expense account of around eight thousand.” Blue arrows. “That was for starters. The next year his salary went up to ten thousand, his expenses to nearly fifteen thousand and he borrowed another twenty thousand from the company, free of interest.” More blue arrows. “Now tell me this. Why did Blackett let Wiseman do it?”
Morrissey was staring in a bemused manner at the diagram, which was sprouting more arrows than St. Sebastian. He said, “I dunno. Perhaps it was because he owed him all that money.”
“But he didn’t.”
“I thought you said—”
“He paid back the one hundred thousand pounds in six months, with the proceeds of the first property sales. After that he didn’t owe him a penny.”
Morrissey grunted. He was beginning to get an idea of what Abel was driving at. Two sides of his puzzle were beginning to link up.
Abel said, “After the money had been repaid, there was no reason in the world for Blackett to put up with Arnie’s tarradiddles. He controlled Argon. He could throw Arnie off the Board whenever he wanted to. And if he did allow him to stay, he could monitor his expenses and refuse to make him interest-free loans, or any other sort of loan at all. So why did Blackett stand for it?”
“Because Arnie had got him by the short and curlies. That what you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Somehow, when he loaned him that one hundred thousand pounds, Arnie put Blackett on the spot. I’ve got one or two ideas about how he could have fixed it, and if I could only get a sight of the documents they signed at the time—”
Morrissey banged his large fist down on the table and said, “Moule.” “Mole?”
“Moule with a u.”
The two sides were coming very close now.
“Let me tell you something for a change,” said Morrissey. “The way this all started was I got a buzz from one of my pet grasses that a hopped-up old toe-rag was wandering round South-East London claiming that he’d got some papers stowed away somewhere which would blow the great Randall Blackett sky high. So why didn’t he use them? Answer because if he did, Blackett’s friend Trombo would cut him into small pieces with one of his lovely knives and feed the pieces into a mincing machine.”
“And the tramp is Moule.”
“I’m beginning to think that must be right. Listen. Moule used to work in the offices of Blackett’s accountants, someone, somebody and Lyon. It was the senior partner who looked after all Blackett’s affairs. I’ve forgotten his name.”
“Martindale, Mantegna and Lyon.”
“Bang on. It was Julius Mantegna. He’d be one man who’d have been able to tell us exactly what was in those papers. So would Blackett’s partner, Colonel Paterson. He’d have had to sign anything involving the company. The only other person who might have known the details was Mantegna’s confidential secretary.”
“Then couldn’t we ask—”
“You won’t be able to ask any of them anything. They all went under a five-ton lorry on Highgate Hill in a rain storm.”
Abel thought about it. Then he drew an oblong in black, round three smaller circles, and put three little crosses on top of it.
“What you’re saying is that, from that moment, the precise details of Blackett’s bargain with Wiseman were known only to him and Wiseman.”
“Correct.”
“And Wiseman started behaving like a pig who’s got his nose in the trough. And ended up in Trombo’s mincing machine.”
“It fits together, dunnit? Because I’ll tell you something else. Ever since Arnie disappeared, Blackett’s been paying Trombo money. A regular fee every quarter. That’s what makes Trombo such a bloody menace. No one else in his line has got that sort of backing. He can pay for any muscle he wants. Bring villains down from Scotland or in from abroad if he needs them. Cut off his money supplies, and we’d cut him down to size quick enough.”
“Can you prove that Blackett’s financing him?”
“No. The payments are made in notes. I guess Blackett draws the money originally as expenses, but it changes hands half a dozen times before his boy, Harald, takes it down personally to Trombo’s shop. And Harald’s incorruptible.”
“How do you know?”
Morrissey said, with a grin, “Because I tried to corrupt him. I soon saw I wasn’t going to make any distance that way. It had to be done from the other end. First find Moule, quietly and without alerting anyone to what we were up to, which was easier said than done. Get hold of these papers he talked about, if they existed. Then we might know just what Arnie had on Blackett. That would give us Blackett’s motive for having Arnie put away. Then we’d be getting somewhere. I set up this operation. I made it a double one. I borrowed Morgan from our Welsh friends. I needed someone whose face wouldn’t be known in this town. To see if he could work his way down to Moule. Then I got one of the girls in the Fraud Squad. Her job was to work her way up, to Blackett. I don’t mean vamp him. He’s not built that way. But he’s always had a reputation for using smart people when he can find them. I was going to call it ‘Operation Hunt the Slipper.’ Then I got a better idea. One going up, one going down. I called it ‘Snakes and Ladders.’ Remember it?”
“Yes,” said Abel. “Yes, I remember it.” He was back in the nursery, himself and three sisters, poring over the new and exciting game they’d been given for Christmas. The ladders, shortcuts which led you upwards; and the bright, evil, twisting snakes which snatched you back.
“If I remember it rightly,” said Abel, “the really tricky bit came at the end. You had to throw exactly the right number to get you on to the hundredth square. If you overdid it, you went back again and there was a very nasty snake waiting for you on square ninety-seven which could send you nearly down to the bottom again.”
“That’s right,” said Morrissey. “We don’t want any slipups.”
Abel said, “I’m not sure that I understand all the details of your game, even now. But I’m beginning to realise one thing. You’re pointing Morgan at Blackett to get Trombo. You don’t care a damn about Blackett, really. It’s Trombo you want.”
Morrissey looked disconcerted, but only for a moment. He said, “I suppose you could put it like that.”
“Isn’t it a bit dangerous for Morgan?”
“Morgan’s crafty. He’s a professional, and he’s dead careful. We fixed up, when he started, that he was going to operate on his own. No direct communications. He was right about that, too. However careful you are, messages from public telephone booths, that sort of thing, people notice. And I’ve an idea Trombo’s got someone on his payroll in this building.”
Abel looked upset, but not incredulous. He said, “Any idea who?”
“No. Probably someone unimportant. On the telephone exchange, or a messenger. They’re the people who pick things up. That’s why his messages don’t come through police lines at all.”
“But he can communicate?”
“Certainly. The last communiqué I had said he was in touch with Moule and things were coming to a head in about three weeks’ time. Until then, we’ve got nothing to do but wait.”
“And hope.”
“That’s right,” said Morrissey. He sounded unusually serious. “And hope.”