The inspector waited until the door had closed behind Pringle and then called up Miss Timmins on the house phone. “Will you see if you can find Miss Sheila Brooks for me and ask her to come and see me?” Then he had a wash. After Pringle, he felt he needed it. He couldn’t get it out of his mind that there might be something in that story about Cardew and Mrs. Ede. That’s what happened when people threw dirt—some of it stuck.
He greeted the girl who knocked at his door some ten minutes later with a solicitude that was only in part tactical. Here, presumably, was a damsel in distress, and he was by nature chivalrous. She was also extremely pretty, if one liked that blonde chocolate-boxy type. He didn’t, as a matter of fact, except on chocolate boxes. As he looked at her, he thought how little he would have wished to see his own daughter, who was about the same age as Sheila Brooks, with such vivid fingernails, such drastically plucked eyebrows, and such an expression of calculated hardness. However, his gaze was so benevolent that she could have guessed nothing of what was passing in his mind.
“I’m sorry to have to bother you with questions at a time like this, Miss Brooks,” he began, as soon as she was comfortably seated. “I’m afraid Mr. Hind’s sudden death must have been a great blow to you.”
He saw the girl’s lips tremble. Blinking, she felt in her bag for a cigarette and fumblingly lit up, and presently her face was again set in a sophisticated mask.
“It’s bloody, isn’t it?” she said, puffing out a cloud of smoke that almost hid her from view. “Have you any idea who did it?”
Haines shook his head. “Even if we had, Miss Brooks, we’d hardly be announcing the fact to up-and-coming young newspaper reporters. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll ask the questions.”
“Why pick on me?” she asked resentfully.
“Because,” Haines told her, “I hope that as a friend of Mr. Hind’s you may be able to help us.”
She looked at him coldly for a moment and then her shoulders lifted in a shrug. “All right—go ahead.”
“I’d like to know a little about yourself, first. How long have you been working on the Morning Call?”
“About a month.”
“Quite a newcomer, eh?” He smiled disarmingly. “I suppose you started your career on a local newspaper—that’s the usual way, isn’t it?”
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t,” said Sheila. “I skipped that part. I came straight here.”
“Oh? How did you manage that?”
“I knew Joe—Mr. Hind,” she said in a flat voice.
Haines’s expression seemed to invite further confidences.
“At least,” she amended, “my father knew him. He’s Joe’s bank manager—he was, I mean. I’d always wanted to work on a newspaper, and when I heard that one of the bank’s clients was News Editor of the Morning Call I got Dad to talk to him, and Joe took me on for a month’s trial.”
“That was quite a stroke of luck.”
“Yes, I suppose it was.” With startling naïveté she added, “Joe told Dad that it was difficult to find vacancies, but after we’d had a talk he said he thought he could make use of me.”
Haines grunted. “Was your father keen on the idea, too?”
“Not really. Dad’s a bit old-fashioned, but I talked him into it.”
Haines grunted again. He was a bit old-fashioned himself, and he couldn’t help feeling that this young woman’s craving for excitement and romance might have been directed into safer channels. “And Mr. Hind looked after you, I suppose?”
Sheila nodded. “He was frightfully decent. He taught me practically everything I know.”
“And you became very friendly?”
She gave him a defiant stare. “Yes.”
“He took you out sometimes, I suppose—to lunch and so on?”
“Yes, but I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.”
Haines saw no need to tell her that it had to do with olives. “Did you ever quarrel with him?”
“Certainly not. Why should I? He was always very nice to me.”
Haines gazed thoughtfully at this pretty chit who had been let loose among the wolves of Fleet Street. There wasn’t much point, he felt, in probing her relationship with Hind, and he’d had enough of that sort of thing for one day. Quite possibly she had been the man’s mistress, thinking it part of the adventure. She might have quarrelled with him, in spite of her emphatic denial. He might have given her cause for jealousy—even in so short a time as a month. But nothing that had been said in this interview so far gave the inspector reason to think that the late Joe Hind’s girl-friend had either the intensity of feeling or the calibre to plan and carry out a skilful, coldblooded murder, even if she had had a motive. A fit of the sulks or a slap in the face would have been more in her line. No, he was wasting his time. She would, he believed, fade quickly from the case, and—now that her patron had gone—probably from Fleet Street too.
Perfunctorily he put a routine question. “Have you any idea yourself who might have wanted to kill Mr. Hind?”
The forget-me-not blue eyes opened wide. “Of course not. How could I have?”
“You knew him very well. You must have heard him speak of other men—if not of other women. Do you know of anyone who was on bad terms with him?”
Sheila slowly shook her head. “That was the thing about Joe—he always got on so well with everybody.” Then she suddenly remembered. “Oh, there was Bill Iredale, though. Joe and he nearly had a fight in the Crown last night.”
Haines sat forward with a jerk. “What about?”
“Well, it sounds absurd,” said Sheila, “but I think it was about me.” She appeared to find the recollection not wholly unpleasant.
“About you? Why, did you know Mr. Iredale?” New possibilities suddenly teemed in Haines’s fertile imagination.
“That’s the absurd part,” said Sheila. “I don’t know what it had to do with the Iredale man, because I’d hardly set eyes on him before, but he suddenly said some awful things to me about Joe as we were going out. He had the hell of a nerve. Joe was furious and so was I. I really thought they were going to hit each other.”
“Do you remember what it was that Mr. Iredale said?”
“Not exactly—but he was definitely the aggressor. He seemed to be trying to warn me against Joe. I think he must have been a bit tight.” A note of excitement was creeping into Sheila’s voice and Haines began to wonder if after all he had under-rated her suitability for Fleet Street reporting. “His eyes were full of hate and he was leaning forward, glowering, and looking just as though he’d like to throttle Joe. It was quite frightening, really—I can’t think what would have happened if Katharine Camden hadn’t separated them.”
“How long did this quarrel last?”
“Oh, it was all over in a moment or two. It had flared up, you see. But it was terribly fierce while it lasted.”
Haines gave a brief nod. It didn’t look as though he were going to get any more hard facts out of the girl, who obviously fancied herself as the central figure in an exciting drama. He would get his information from Iredale.
“Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Miss Brooks,” he said. “You must forgive me if I’ve seemed inquisitive about your personal affairs. We’re doing our very best, you know, to find out who killed Mr. Hind.”
She sensed dismissal, but she didn’t want to go. It was all right as long as she kept talking, but she feared the outer loneliness. “It won’t bring him back, will it?” she said. She looked very forlorn now—a confused, miserable child who’d got into deep water and didn’t know how to struggle out. As she turned to leave, Haines saw that tears were running down her cheeks. She sniffed a “Good-bye” and he stood and watched her till she turned the corner of the corridor.