Clara decided not to open the champagne. Firstly, she didn’t yet know whether she had anything to celebrate. Secondly, because she’d already had a Bee’s Knees then a glass of wine with dinner. She needed to keep a clear head. The champagne had merely been a ruse to disguise the real reason the barman had sent the waiter up to her room: to deliver the cocktail glasses she and Jack Danskin had drunk from before dinner. Clara had set the whole thing up in advance. She’d spoken to the barman and asked him to ensure the waiter who attended them wore gloves to collect the glasses – and to only touch the stems. She had taken the barman’s fingerprints in the late afternoon, after she got back from Whitley Bay, so as to eliminate his prints from the mix. Any questions he might have had as to why she was doing what she was doing were soon silenced by a healthy tip – both for him and the waiter.
The cocktail glasses were wrapped in a napkin and delivered on a tray next to the champagne bucket and two clean glasses. If Jack Danskin were watching, he might wonder who it was she was entertaining in her hotel room. Well, let him wonder. If it were he who broke into her hotel room the other evening, the thought that she had a guest might deter him from trying again. And just in case it didn’t, Clara had spoken to the police constable who was still on patrol outside the hotel to keep an eye on the fire escape outside her room. She had played the scared damsel in distress, to the best of her limited acting ability, and it seemed to have done the trick. The constable said he would keep an eye out for anything untoward.
Clara laid out her fingerprint kit on the dressing table and spread all the photographs of prints she had already taken out on the bed. She also placed the fingerprint card of the barman there. She had not had time to photograph it and develop it at Uncle Bob’s house, but it didn’t matter. The three matching prints, taken from the office, hotel and, most disturbingly, from the trunk at the Paradise, were grouped together. If Jack Danskin’s prints matched, she had to face the fact that she had just had dinner with a murderer.
Using gloves, she brushed aluminium powder onto the glasses. Four sets of prints emerged: three on one glass, two on the second. She assumed that one of the sets was hers. With the aid of a magnifying glass and the enlarged photograph of her own prints, she identified which prints were hers. Thereafter she compared the other two prints to the card of the barman, and sure enough one of the sets belonged to him. The same set was on the second glass. So, that left two sets of prints, one on each glass, that belonged to Danskin. Clara compared them through the magnifying glass. After having done this so many times in the last few days, following the methods in Professor Gross’s handbook, she was becoming familiar with identifying patterns in the whorls, loops and arches. It didn’t take her long to confirm that the remaining prints on both glasses were indeed the same, and, by the process of elimination, had to belong to Jack Danskin.
She circled the relevant prints using her eyebrow pencil and photographed them. She would go to Uncle Bob’s house in the morning to develop them. For now though, she went to the bed and selected the crop of three photographs. Again, with her magnifying glass, she compared the characteristics of the prints. And as she did so she became increasingly anxious. While the whorls looked similar, there was a marked difference in the loops and arches. She checked and rechecked, but eventually was forced to accept that Jack Danskin’s prints did not match the three.
She looked up from her work and faced herself directly in the mirror. ‘It’s not him,’ she said out loud. ‘What the hell am I going to do now?’
After a few moments she went back to the bed and scanned all the photographs and prints she had. It was a growing list: her own, Mrs Hobson, Uncle Bob, Juju and Jonny Levine, Alice Whittaker, Horace Fender, the barman, and finally Jack Danskin. She hunched over each image with her magnifying glass, and – for good measure – a torch, but finally had to accept that none of the prints matched the three. Whomever had broken into the office and searched the filing cabinet, then broken into her hotel room and finally touched the metal trunk that Horace Fender had stood on before hanging, it was not Jack Danskin.
She swept all the photos aside and threw herself onto the bed, beating the pillow in frustration and letting out a muffled howl. Eventually she calmed herself, flipped onto her back and stared at the ceiling. She had made a classic researcher’s error. Undergraduates were taught, time and again, not to allow a hypothesis to take root and colour the results of an experiment. Hypotheses should be held lightly and changed as evidence challenged or disproved them, and a researcher must be prepared to follow the evidence even if it meant ultimately disproving their own theories. She would not allow herself to become disheartened. Yes, she had believed that the circumstantial evidence pointed to Jack Danskin, but the concrete evidence so far did not.
She still did not trust Danskin, and believed his association with Balshard Insurance suggested he might still be involved in the case in some way. And that his interest in becoming a partner in Wallace Enquiry Agency – or even buying it out completely – was motivated at least partly by a desire to shut down or scupper the Whittaker case. But whether she liked it or not, the prints were not his. Could he have paid an associate to commit the crimes? Someone she had not yet met? Very possibly. He could have paid the young lad to accost her in the park and someone else – an older man – to carry out the break-ins and, possibly, kill Horace Fender. But again, she had no evidence to back it up.
She did, though have evidence that Will Spencer had been falsely accused by Horace Fender, and that Horace Fender had bought kerosene, which was then used as an accelerant in the Paradise fire and that it was Fender, not Will Spencer, who had locked the back door of the cinema, with fatal consequences. And she had evidence that chloroform had been used on Fender before his death; and that he had been employed by Humphrey Balshard in some capacity. Even if there was no evidence, yet, that Balshard had ordered the fire to be lit and orchestrated the ensuing cover-up, or that he’d been involved in Fender’s murder, she believed she still had enough to present to the authorities in order for Alice Whittaker’s insurance claim to be reconsidered – and that was what she had been hired to do.
She got up and splashed water on her face, then cleaned off her make-up. She had earlier asked to borrow a typewriter from the hotel office. It was currently on the floor in the corner of the room. She cleared the dressing table and picked up the typewriter together with a ream of carbon paper so she could have triplicate copies – one for herself, a second for Roger Jennings whom she hoped would represent Alice Whittaker, and a third for the judge she still had to meet. Then she rang the room service bell. If she was going to write a clear and credible report, summarising her evidence so far, she needed coffee. The stronger the better.