While Mr Thewless and his charge were moving unsteadily down the corridor of the 4.55 from Euston Detective-Inspector Thomas Cadover was crossing a broad London thoroughfare with the unconcern of a man once accustomed to controlling the traffic in such places with a pair of large white gloves. Nowadays his attire was pervasively sombre and his hair the only thing that was white about him: it had gone that way as the result of thirty years of fighting Metropolitan crime. During this long period he had seen many men come to the same job and not a few of these leave again – promoted, demoted, retired, or resigned. The fanatical Hudspith was gone and so was the wayward Appleby. But Cadover himself hung on, his hair a little thinner each year as well as whiter, his expression a little grimmer, his eyes sadder, his mouth compressed in an ever firmer line. He had seen tide upon tide of vice and lawlessness rise and lap round the city. Of low life and criminal practice he had seen whole new kinds sprout and flourish; he had seen criminology, answering these, transform itself and transform itself again. Sometimes he thought it about time he was giving over. Still, he was not giving over yet.
He paused on the kerb and bought an evening paper. He turned to the stop press. West End Cinema Tragedy, he read. Scotland Yard Suspects Foul Play.
Well, he was Scotland Yard – and the cinema was still a hundred yards off. Newspapers were wonderfully ahead with the news these days. He walked on and the Metrodrome rose before him. Across its monstrous façade sprawled a vast plywood lady. If erect, she would be perhaps fifty feet high; she was reclining, however, in an attitude of sultry abandon amid equatorial vegetation and in a garment the only prominent feature of which was a disordered shoulder-strap. As a background to the broadly accentuated charms of her person – pleasantly framed, indeed, between her six-foot, skyward-pointing breasts – was what appeared to be a two-ocean navy in process of sinking through tropical waters like a stone. One limp hand held a smoking revolver seemingly responsible for this extensive catastrophe. The other, supporting her head, was concealed in a spouting ectoplasm of flaxen hair. Her expression was languorous, provocative, and irradiated by a sort of sanctified lecherousness highly creditable to both the craft and the ardent soul of the unknown painter who had created her. Poised in air, and in curves boldly made to follow the line of her swelling hips, were the words AMOROUS, ARROGANT, ARMED! Above this, in letters ten feet high, was the title PLUTONIUM BLONDE. And higher still, and in rubric scarcely less gigantic, was the simple announcement: ART’S SUPREME ACHIEVEMENT TO DATE.
There were queues all round the cinema. The crowd could afford to be patient. Here, as at Eve’s first party in the Garden, there was no fear lest supper cool; within this monstrous temple of unreason the celluloid feast perpetually renewed itself. And aloft in her other Paradise that second Eve, a prodigal confusion of tropical flesh and nordic tresses, spread wide the snare of her loosened zone and grotesquely elongated limbs. She was like a vast mechanized idol sucking in to her own uses these slowly moving conveyor-belts of humanity… And the crowds were growing as Cadover watched. People were buying the evening paper, reading the stop press and lining up. For here was sensation within sensation. Art’s supreme achievement to date. Scotland Yard suspects foul play.
Another squalid crime… Circumstances had made Inspector Cadover a philosopher, and because he was a philosopher he was now depressed. This was the celebrated atom film. This was the manner in which his species chose to take its new command of natural law. Fifty thousand people had died at Hiroshima, and at Bikini ironclads had been tossed in challenge to those other disintegrating nuclei of the sun. The blood-red tide was loosed. And here it was turned to hog’s wash at five shillings the trough, and entertainment tax extra. That some wretched Londoner had met a violent death while taking his fill semed a very unimportant circumstance. To track down the murderer – if murderer there was – appeared a revoltingly useless task. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world – so what the hell did it matter? Better step into a telephone-box and call the Yard. Then he could send in his resignation in the morning and join some crank movement demanding international sovereignty…
Inspector Cadover’s feet carried him automatically forward – as automatically as if he had been on his beat nearly forty years before. He was skirting the long queue for the cheaper seats. There was a woman clutching the hand of a fretful five-year-old boy with a chocolate-smeared mouth and sleep-heavy eyes. There were two lovers already beginning to cuddle in the crush. There was an apostate intellectual, furtive and embarrassed, caught by that scanty cincture overhead like a fly on a flypaper. Cadover went grimly forward and the vast building received him. Underfoot the padded carpet was heavy as desert sand.
Three constables stood in the foyer. They could be no manner of use there; the management had doubtless wangled their presence as a little extra advertisement for its latest, and unforeseen, sensation. Cadover was about to scowl when he remembered that this would dismay them, and that they were only doing what they were told. So he nodded briskly and passed on. A slinky young man had appeared and was proposing to conduct him to the manager. The slinky young man contrived to insinuate that this was a privilege. Cadover, smouldering, marched forward still. Banks of flowers floated past him, gilt and scarlet chairs on which no one had ever sat, little fountains playing beneath changing coloured lights. Hectically tinted photographs as big as tablecloths, each with a disconcerting tilt to its picture-plane, presented curly-headed young men with butterfly ties, sleek-haired not-so-young men with smeared moustaches, a Negro in a straw hat, a nude girl knock-kneed and simpering behind a muff, the members of an entire symphony orchestra dressed like circus clowns… A door was opened and Cadover was aware of bare boards and a good rug, of bare walls and Dürer’s Apollo and Diana. This was the manager’s room. Its conscious superiority to the wares peddled outside was very nasty. Cadover’s gloom increased.
The manager was sitting at a Chippendale table lightly scattered with objects suggesting administrative cares. On a couch at the far end of the room lay what was evidently a human body, covered with a sheet. By the window stood a glum, uniformed sergeant of police, staring out over London.
The manager rose. His manner appeared to aim at that of somebody very high up in a bank, and he received Cadover as if he came from among the middle reaches of his more substantial clients. ‘An unpleasant thing, this,’ he said. ‘But if we must show a film of which the highlight is a holocaust what can we honestly say of a mere solitary killing in the Grand Circle? “Irony,” I said to myself at once when they told me about it. “It’s like cheap irony.” And then I had them bring the body straight in here. Now we shall have nothing but standing room for a fortnight. The cinema industry, my dear Inspector, is nothing but a great whore. And you might call this the tart’s supreme achievement to date.’
The slinky young man giggled deferentially. Cadover, who did not care for this cynical travesty of his own responses, looked round the room. ‘The tart,’ he said, ‘would appear to treat her doorkeepers handsomely enough.’ There was a brief silence. The slinky young man giggled on another and an abruptly checked note. Cadover walked over to the body and twitched away the sheet. ‘Unknown?’ he asked.
The sergeant had come up beside him. ‘No identification yet, sir. It’s been made deliberately difficult.’
‘This happened in the auditorium?’ Cadover turned to the manager. ‘And you had the body hauled out on your own responsibility?’
‘Certainly. There was nothing else to do. And it wasn’t known that the fellow was dead until they had him out in the upper foyer.’ The manager returned to his desk and consulted a note. ‘Lights went up at the end of Plutonium Blonde, the time being three minutes past four. One of the girls we call usherettes’ – and the manager made a fastidious face over this barbarism – ‘saw the fellow slumped in his seat and went up to have a look at him. He didn’t look right, so she called the floor manager. That was the regular procedure. The floor manager gave him a shake, and then saw the blood. By that time there was a bit of a fuss round about, so he sent one of the girls for a couple of commissionaires and to call up a doctor. He supposed, you know, that the fellow had suffered a haemorrhage, or something like that. By this time the lights were due to go down, and he didn’t stop them, since he didn’t want more disturbance than need be. But as the body was lifted out he saw that it was a body – that the fellow was dead – and he tells me that the notion of foul play did enter his mind. He called two firemen to stand by where the thing had happened – fortunately it was right in the back row – and then he came straight up to me. I gave instructions for the body to be brought in here and for the police to be called up at once. Then I went in to see how it was with the seats where the thing had happened. The row immediately in front was full. But the dead man’s seat was, of course, still empty, and so was one seat on his right and three on his left. So I ordered the whole five to be roped off and guarded. Then your men arrived and my responsibility ended. Lights go up again in five minutes. Of course, if you want the theatre cleared and closed, I will have it done. Only you might put me through to your Assistant Commissioner first. I have to consider my directors, you know.’
Cadover made no reply. He turned to the sergeant. ‘Well?’
‘We arrived while they were still showing the short that follows Plutonium Blonde. There seemed no point in sealing the place. People had been pouring out and in during the previous interval – the one during which the discovery of the body was made. But, of course, there was the question of people nearby when the thing occurred who might still be in the theatre. There was that, and there was what the usherettes might know, and there was clearing a space round the spot where the thing had happened, and searching it in the interval after the short. Inspector Morton is on that now, sir, with half a dozen men from the district. But I understand they’ve come on nothing yet. The crime appears to have passed unnoticed.’
‘Unnoticed? But this man was shot. You can’t shoot a man in a public place without–’
The remainder of Cadover’s sentence was drowned in a sudden crashing explosion which made Dürer’s engraving rattle on the wall. The manager sighed resignedly. ‘Disgraceful,’ he murmured. ‘Do you know that between the auditorium and this room there are two supposedly soundproof walls? We shall have people calling quacks from Harley Street to swear that they’ve been deafened, and we shall have to pay thousands of pounds. And, of course, it’s indecent too. Much more indecent than rows of ghastly little trollops waggling their photogenic haunches. The Lord Chamberlain should intervene. When I was a young man I had idealism, Inspector, I assure you. I saw Film as a great new aesthetic form. Those were the days of the early Clairs, and of Potemkin and Storm over Asia. And to think that it should all come to this…! Would you care for a cigar?’
The slinky young man, looking awed, produced a box of Coronas from a drawer. Cadover petrified him with a scowl. ‘Was that meant to be an exploding bomb?’ he asked.
The manager nodded. ‘An atomic one. The biggest noise in the entire noisesome history of the screen. Sound’s greatest triumph. The explosion kills seventy-five thousand supers hired at five dollars a head. It also blows the clothes off a gaggle of girls in a cabaret. It’s all very disheartening to people like ourselves. To say nothing of being an invitation to murder. For plainly the shot was fired just as the sound-track triumphantly broke the record. Ingenious, come to think of it. The poor fellow must have been lured in expressly to be shot under cover of that hideous row. And then he was robbed.’
‘Robbed?’ Cadover turned sharply on the sergeant.
‘I don’t think it should be called that, sir. Everything – or nearly everything – was certainly lifted from the body. But there was more to it than that. Bits of the clothing were cut away.’
‘Bits of the clothing.’
‘Yes, sir. You know there are three places where a good tailor usually sews in a tab with a name – an inner jacket pocket, a waistcoat pocket, and the inside of the trouser-tops at the back. Well, all these places have been cut out.’
There was a silence while Cadover verified this. ‘I can understand the shooting,’ he said. ‘With a smokeless powder, and when the audience was stunned and distracted by that uproar, the thing would be possible enough. But that anyone should then be able to tumble the body about–’
The slinky young man giggled. ‘It was in the back row, Inspector, and you must remember how people do behave in a cinema – and particularly there. Lovers embrace and fondle each other in the darkness–’
‘That’s deplorably true.’ The manager had assumed an expression of refined repugnance. ‘With a little care, this bold rifling of the body could be made to bear the appearance of mere amorous dalliance. What a splendid point for the Sunday papers that will be.’
Cadover frowned. ‘Initials? Laundry marks?’
‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant nodded. ‘Several of the undergarments have the initials P C.’
Once more the slinky young man giggled. ‘I don’t suppose that they could stand for Police Constable, could they?’
The manager looked offended. ‘Really, Louis, this is no occasion for unfeeling jokes. A hard-boiled attitude is quite out of place.’ The manager lit a cigarette, strolled across the room, and glanced indifferently down at the body. ‘About thirty, would you say? And a military type. Nothing like the Army for wiping off an individuality a face may once have been blessed with. You could pick half a dozen almost identical young officers out of any line regiment.’
This was true. For that sort of identification which is sometimes achieved with the aid of smudgy photographs exhibited outside police-stations or in the Press there could scarcely, Cadover reflected, be a less promising subject. Not that it ought to come to that. Perhaps, within a few hours, and almost certainly within a few days, there would be a link-up with one of the endless inquiries after missing persons that flow in upon the Metropolitan Police. A body not ultimately thus identified would be a rarity indeed… He turned to the sergeant. ‘Everything been done here?’
‘Yes, sir. And Inspector Morton is in a room just opposite.’
‘I’ll see him now. Have the body removed.’ Cadover nodded curtly to the manager and walked out. The foyer was crowded. Plutonium Blonde was over. The evening’s final showing of the programme was about to begin.
Inspector Morton was interviewing a succession of girls dressed in bell-bottomed white trousers and enormous scarlet bows. Two constables were making shorthand notes and another was recording the proceedings on a dictaphone. The room was a humbler version of that occupied by the manager, and there was another Dürer engraving on the wall. Perhaps it belonged to the slinky young man called Louis.
‘All we found.’ Inspector Morton had interrupted himself to jerk a thumb at a table behind him. Cadover crossed to it and saw a bunch of keys, a pile of loose change, and a pocket diary.
‘Finger-prints?’
‘Been attended to. The diary was in the hip-pocket and must have been missed when the body was rifled. It has a few interesting scribbles.’ Morton turned back to the girl before him.
Cadover picked up the diary. It was new and at a first glance appeared entirely unused. He turned to the page for that day. Scrawled in pencil he read:
gun for boy 1.15.
He turned to the preceding page and found:
N I police re guns etc.
Light railway from Dundrane
Two days earlier he found:
Bolderwood
Hump
He continued to search. Throughout the diary there was only one other entry. It occurred six days before and read:
Smith’s 7.30
Cadover put down the diary, picked up the bunch of keys, and examined them carefully one by one. Then he did the same with the little pile of silver and copper coins. One florin he inspected for some time. Then he turned round. A pair of sailor’s trousers – very tight above and baggy below – was swaying from the room, and Inspector Morton was staring at this departure in unflattering absence of mind. ‘Cadover,’ he said, ‘do you think it might be terrorists?’
‘No.’
Morton sighed. ‘It was easy to do, and the setting will give it sensational value. But no doubt you’re right. Some of these girls are far from being fools. A lot behind, but something on top as well.’ Morton paused and, getting no response to this, sighed again. ‘To begin with, something emerges from the box-office. They have been showing to full houses, but when the lights went up and the body was noticed there was one empty seat on its left and three on its right. Four people had left before the end of Plutonium Blonde – before the end, that is to say, of its first showing of the day. So there was no question of those people leaving when the film reached the point at which they had come in. Moreover, for that showing those seats could be booked – and they had been booked. So I thought at once of quite a little gang on the job. They had their victim nicely isolated, and after killing him they all cleared out. But there is a point that is pretty conclusively against that.’
‘The booking?’
‘Exactly. When you book, the girl in the box-office hands you the numbered tickets and makes a blue cross on the correspondingly numbered seats on a plan. And here we come upon the blessings of industrial psychology. How to make blue-pencil crosses on a plan with most speed and least fatigue. Pushing up production per man-hour – or girl-hour, in this case.’
‘Ah.’ Cadover’s expression indicated no appreciation of this embroidery.
‘Two seats is zig-zag, zig-zag. Three seats is zig-zag-zig, zig-zag-zig. In other words, you can study the line of crosses and distinguish the number of seats booked at a time. Of the five seats in question, three were booked at one go, and two at another. There can have been no concerted booking of all five.’
‘Does that follow? The bookings may have been successive. One fellow comes immediately behind the other and simply says he’ll have the next three.’
Morton shook his head. ‘In this case, I think not. The block of three has been crossed off with a much more recently sharpened pencil than the block of two. And if one wanted to make sure of all five seats one would scarcely–’
‘Quite. But does the girl in the box-office remember anything about the people concerned?’
‘Definitely not. It couldn’t be expected. The job is purely mechanical and she must have lost all interest in the faces peering in on her long ago. But it’s a different matter when we come upstairs to the usherettes. We get far more than we might hope for from them… Look here, I’ll draw a plan. It will explain the situation until you can see for yourself.’ And Morton reached for a pencil. ‘The seats in question we’ll call ABCDE, and you can see that A comes next to a gangway. It’s the back row, remember, so there’s nobody behind. From the people in front and to the right we may get something, though I doubt it now. The body was in B. And it was ABC that were booked together in a block of three, and DE that were booked together in a block of two… I think we may say that something of a picture begins to emerge.’ And Morton tapped his pencil with some complacency on the table before him.
Cadover grunted. ‘What about those usherettes?’
‘Ah! Well, there’s a girl who remembers showing the dead man to his seat. But he didn’t bring three tickets; he brought two. And there was already someone – a woman – in A. Nobody remembers the woman arriving. She may just have had her counterfoil taken at the entrance and found her way to her seat herself. You can see it was an easy one to find. But her ticket, mind you, had been bought along with B and C.’
Cadover committed himself to his first judgement. ‘Good,’ he said.
‘And this girl remembers who came with the dead man. It was a boy. He might have been about fifteen. Now, of course, that’s pretty queer. It suggests that the crime was perpetrated by a woman and a lad. Not but what the woman’s function isn’t clear.’
‘It is at least conjecturable.’
Morton nodded. ‘Put it that way, if you like. The dead man believed that on his left there was a stranger having no interest in him. Actually, the woman may have been his murderer. And certainly she had her part to play as soon as he was dead. Everything that might serve to identify the body–’
‘Quite so. The manager here has tumbled to that. The job was done under the appearance of hugging and being hugged.’ Cadover stared sombrely at Morton’s plan. ‘And then this woman, and the boy who had lured the victim to his fate, slipped out. Did anyone remark that?’
‘No. We have nothing but the arrival of the man and boy. By the way, though, it was something about the boy that had struck the usherette’s attention. He wore a bowler hat.’
‘Is there anything so remarkable in that? You and I both wear bowler hats.’
Morton chuckled. ‘That’s because we are both a particular sort of policeman. Mere lads don’t often wear them nowadays. Possibly some conservatively inclined office-boys in the city still do, but on the whole it’s a habit confined to a few public schools which like their boys to dress like that when in Town. That’s what attracted the notice of this usherette – the glamour attaching to our fading institutions of privilege.’ Morton lingered over this phrase with evident pride. ‘And she says that he didn’t look quite right. She says that that’s why she noticed him. Bowler hat and all, he didn’t look quite right… But one would expect her to say that now.’
‘Of course one would – but then might she not be correct?’ Cadover smiled a rare smile. ‘Public schoolboys with lethal intentions are quite wrong.’ His expression grew dark again. ‘Commonly they have to wait till they grow up and we turn them into airmen and soldiers.’
‘No doubt.’ Morton was slightly shocked. ‘Anyway, that’s all we have about ABC. But we also have something about DE. Another usherette is sure she noticed two people who must have come from DE. She noticed them because they came out in a bit of a hurry and almost caused a disturbance. They came out to the right – that is to say, not past ABC, but past a much longer line of seats, all occupied, on the other side. People sometimes come blundering out because they are feeling ill, and this usherette came forward in case it was anything like that. She shone a torch for them and then caught a glimpse of them in the light of an opening door. It was a boy and a girl.’
‘Children, does she mean?’
‘Not exactly. As a matter of fact, there’s something odd there. She is quite clear that the girl was about seventeen. But when I asked the age of the boy, she first said that he looked no more than twelve, but later corrected that and declared he might have been sixteen.’
Cadover considered. ‘Well, it was only a momentary glimpse, and a conflicting impression of the sort might be quite possible. Did she notice anything about them in particular?’
‘It was the lad who was really in a hurry, she says. He was bustling out the girl, who was just bewildered and a little cross. Well, of course there was one attractive explanation of that. This lad, sitting perhaps in D, became aware that something horrid had happened on his left, and he decided to get his girl and himself clear of it. An adult, as we very well know, is apt to behave in just that way, and it would be very understandable in a boy. But, as it happens, there’s a big difficulty in taking that view. For the usherette is quite confident that those two young people pushed out before the big bang. They were clear of the auditorium before the girl in the picture is represented as letting off the bomb.’
‘The girl lets it off?’ Cadover frowned at his own irrelevance. ‘Of course, the lad may simply have tumbled to the fact that, although nothing nasty had actually happened on his left, something of the kind was working up. Not that that’s a likely explanation. The essence of the killing must have lain in sudden and unsuspected assault. Perhaps the film makes another big noise a bit earlier?’
‘Apparently it doesn’t. Even for a revolver with a silencer – which is a clumsy thing – there would be just the one chance. We must take it that the couple in DE left before either murder or hint of murder. In fact, it looks as if they are out of the picture. Whatever their reason for leaving early, it just doesn’t concern our affair.’ Morton hesitated. ‘Only the usherette noticed one other odd thing. I wonder if you could guess what it was?’
Cadover shook his head, his expression indicating the conviction that the case stood in no need of conundrums arbitrarily added.
‘The lad she saw leaving had a bowler hat.’
‘Um.’ Cadover’s was a quintessentially noncommittal grunt.
‘So it almost looks as if the lad who appeared to leave DE was the same who arrived in company of the dead man to occupy BC.’
‘It is far from a safe assumption. And if the booking of ABC and DE respectively were indeed entirely independent it is also a difficult one.’
Morton nodded glumly. ‘I suppose that’s so. But this usherette’s response – the one who showed the boy and girl out – corresponds oddly to that of the other – the one who showed a man and boy to BC.’
‘You mean that she felt there was something wrong about the boy?’
‘No, not that – although there is the odd fact of her being in doubt about his age. I mean that a bit of class-consciousness again came in. She was aware of the bowler hat as a manifesto – as saying, “My education costs papa at least two hundred a year”.’
‘Your manner of questioning usherettes must be extraordinarily skilful.’ Cadover spoke quite without irony. ‘But does this lead out anywhere?’
‘Only to this – that the usherette then went on to distinguish the girl as not coming out of at all the same drawer. Whatever the feminine equivalent of the bowler hat may be, the girl didn’t possess it. “A cheap little thing” – that’s what the usherette called her.’ And Morton shook his head. ‘It’s extraordinary how snobbish people are. But it’s a little stroke added to the picture – though whether to our picture one can’t say. We do know one thing we have to look for. If the two lads were not the same, and if the usherette’s nice social sense was not astray, we have to find and question a prosperous youth of problematical age who was giving some little shop-girl an afternoon at the pictures.’
Cadover nodded. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said seriously, ‘that it opens what might be called a wide field of reference. One of the uses of prosperity is to entertain little shop-girls in that way… There is nothing else on the cinema side of the affair?’
‘Nothing at all, so far. And I doubt whether more will emerge. It’s already more than we might hope for.’
‘I agree with you. Now, what about this diary which was in a hip pocket and therefore missed? Can we make much of it?’
‘It’s most tiresomely new.’ Morton stood up and walked to a window. ‘One might guess that the dead man lost his diary something like a fortnight ago, that he then bought this new one, and that, anyway, he didn’t use such a thing very much. The first entry occurs a week last Tuesday and says, “Smith’s 7.30”. Is that right?’
‘Just that. It sounds like a dinner engagement.’
‘And with a pal who couldn’t have a less helpful name.’ Morton was drumming moodily on a window-pane. ‘“Robinson” wouldn’t be so hopeless by half.’
‘I don’t at all know about it’s being hopeless.’ Cadover had looked up sharply. ‘It might be the restaurant, might it not?’
‘Good lord – you’ve got something there! It’s the first real light we’ve struck, likely enough. Can you work the same trick with the other entries? The next is on Monday, isn’t it? Just the name “Bolderwood” followed by something odd that I’ve forgotten.’
‘It’s followed by “Hump” – just that. The way it’s arranged looks rather like the beginning of an address. We might do worse than look for somebody of the name of Bolderwood living at–’ Cadover shook his head. ‘Some English villages have precious queer names, but I doubt whether we’d find one called Hump.’
‘What about a house?’ Morton’s face brightened. ‘People give the most idiotic names to houses. Dash Bolderwood, Esqre, The Hump… What do you think of that?’
‘At the moment I think we’ll pass on. The next entry occurs yesterday. “N I police re guns etc.” – and immediately below “Light railway from Dundrane”.’
‘Well, Dundrane explains N I, because it’s a town in Northern Ireland. And seeing police about guns may not be as sinister as it sounds. If you travel to Eire by way of Northern Ireland and want to take dutiable objects in with you and out again you have to collect some sort of certificate from the Northern Ireland Police on the way.’ Morton sat down, well pleased with his own grasp here. ‘Again, it is the remoter parts of Ireland which are served by light railways, and it’s a reasonable inference that the dead man was proposing a trip there and had been making some inquiries about how to proceed. And, of course, there seems to be a tie-up with the final entry – that under today’s date. “Gun for boy 1.15” it reads, doesn’t it? The figures can scarcely represent a bore, or anything technical like that. They must be a time of day – and presumably not in the middle of the night. At a quarter past one this afternoon something was to be done about a gun for a boy. And if guns and the dead man were going to Ireland so presumably was the boy. And a boy was with the dead man in this cinema within an hour of that time. Now, you don’t hunt out a gun for a boy at one fifteen, or forward one, or pack one. That note of a precise time means an appointment – and, ten to one, an appointment to buy a gun. They bought a gun together – a shot-gun of some sort, one must presume – and then they came on here, and then the boy was a party to the man’s murder and to the concealment of his identity. It’s a most extraordinary picture.’
Cadover as he listened to this efficient analysis was gloomily pacing the room. He paused before the Dürer. This one was a fantastic representation of the Assumption of the Magdalen. She was poised nude in air and appeared to be sprouting cherubs all over her like a Surinam toad. Down below a clerkly person raised a hand as if to study this phenomenon against the glare of the sun. Probably the clerkly person was blankly incredulous. But the world really is full of tall stories… ‘Yes,’ said Cadover; ‘it’s a most extraordinary picture.’
‘But gives us several lines.’
‘Quite so. They will have photographs of the dead man by now. I can try Smith’s. In the morning I can try the likely gunsmiths. Then there are possible bookings to Ireland by anyone with the initials PC. Then what about it being by a light railway from Dundrane that one reaches Mr Bolderwood of the Hump? As you say, there are several lines.’
‘To be sure there are.’ And Morton looked at his watch and stood up – a man not dissatisfied. ‘The problem’s a tough one, but it can be worn down in time.’
Cadover had risen too, and now he reached for his hat – his bowler hat. ‘Has it occurred to you,’ he asked abruptly, ‘that this crime may have no meaning in itself?’
‘In itself?’
‘Just that. It may be a mere clearing the ground for some other devilish thing – perhaps in a few hours’ time, perhaps tomorrow or the next day. I’ll make what speed I can. Good night.’